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Friendly or Unfriendly Act? The “Historic” Referral of the Constitutional Court to the ECJ Regarding the ECB's OMT Program

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Alexander Thiele

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The boundaries of European integration and especially the relationship between European and German Constitutional Law have occupied the German Constitutional Court—the Bundesverfassungsgericht in Karlsruhe—time and again since its first Solange I Judgment of 1974. Practically all of these decisions—Solange II, Maastricht, Lisbon, and Honeywell to name just a few—have had a major impact not only on the national, but also on the European discourse regarding the future of the European Union. 14 January 2014 now marks the date of another “historic” decision in this sense, which, unsurprisingly, has already led to major discussions not only in Germany, but all over Europe. For the first time ever the Constitutional Court has initiated a referral to the European Court of Justice asking questions about the conformity of some of the highly disputed measures of the ECB taken to fight the crisis with Primary European Law. The reluctance of the Constitutional Court to comply with its duties under the TFEU and to accept the role of the ECJ as the final interpreter of European Law had been criticized for many years, not only after the Lisbon Decision of 2009. However, the Constitutional Court reacted to these critics in its Honeywell Decision of 2010 and, so it seemed, started to redefine its understanding of its relationship with the European judicial system. This redefining process has now found its temporary endpoint with this first referral, which therefore truly stands for a new era in the relationship between the Constitutional Court and the ECJ within the “European Network of Constitutional Courts.”

Type
Research Article
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 15 , Issue 2: Special issue - The OMT Decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court , 01 March 2014 , pp. 241 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

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42 German citizens could also not file an action against the German Bundesbank if it acted as the ECB under the OMT Program.Google Scholar

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59 In fact, the Court seems simply to be confusing the objective (restoring the transmission mechanism) and the instruments with which the ECB intends to reach this objective (purchasing of government bonds to influence the interest increases). Both, however, have to be strictly separated.Google Scholar

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84 If the Constitutional Court for example demands to leave an appropriate interval between the emission of the bonds and the purchase of these bonds by the ECB then what does “appropriate” mean? An hour, two hours, a day, a week or a month? And is this period always the same or does it depend on other circumstances as well? Without any normative basis these questions seem impossible to answer for the ECJ.Google Scholar