number 1 - Centre d'études et de recherches européennes Robert ...

The Court of Justice and its Role as a driving Force in European Integration 113
In the context of this Treaty, whose specific nature and originality had now
become abundantly obvious, it was seen to be necessary to build up from scratch a
legal entity which did not exist, in this particular shape, in any system of law, national
or international.
There were very few international courts and their powers, by comparison with
what it was proposed to grant the Court of the European Coal and Steel Company
(ECSC), were puny. The International Court of Justice in the Hague, set up within
the UN framework as the successor to the League of Nations' Permanent International
Court of Justice, may well have come to the minds of some, but it was only
and is still only competent for disputes between sovereign states brought before it
by the states, assuming that they had voluntarily accepted the jurisdiction of such a
Court 6 .
Within the ECSC framework the situation was entirely different. The signatories
had delegated sovereign powers to the ECSC. This meant that disputes were no
longer between states, which had been the classical model for international public
law, but related essentially to decisions on the part of one of the Community's
bodies, first and foremost the High Authority.
By taking the place of the national authorities, albeit only partially, in the exercise
of public power, the High Authority was acting on subjects of domestic law –
,in this case, the undertakings concerned –,which could now find themselves facing
the judges at the new Court. And so Community law had become, as it were, the
domestic law of the freshly created sovereign body.
The model which started henceforth to become obvious, as far as powers and
legal proceedings were concerned, was not so much the model of an international
court but rather that of a domestic court of an administrative nature, the principles
of which were familiar to the six partner countries. It was mainly the model of
French administrative law, embodied by the case-law of the French Conseil d'Etat,
which served as a guide to the new law's authors headed by Professor Paul Reuter
and the Conseiller d'Etat, Maurice Lagrange, who was to become one of the Court's
Advocates General 7 . This model was all the more suited to all the partners since,
from many points of view, it was not basically different from the administrative
regimes of the other States concerned. This would most certainly not have been the
case if that common law country, the United Kingdom, had been a party to the
proceedings from the start.
6. A. ANTOINE, "La Cour de justice de la CECA et la Cour internationale de justice", Revue de droit
public et de la science politique, 1953, p. 210 onwards.
7. J. L'HUILLIER, "Une conquête du droit administratif français : le contentieux de la CECA", Dalloz,
Chronique 1953, p. 63 onwards; M. LAGRANGE, "La Cour de justice de la Communauté européenne
du charbon et de l'acier", Revue de droit public et de la science politique, 1954, p. 417
onwards.