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

The Court of Justice and its Role as a driving Force in European Integration 119
rity had no discretionary power of appraisal and was obliged to act as the Treaty
demanded it to do.
A few years later and still under the aegis of the ECSC, the Court was to call
this judgment back to mind when it made the first few articles of the Treaty into a
collection of binding standards for the implementation of the Treaty. The Court
said "The express reference made to Article 3 does not release the High Authority
from its duty to observe the other articles of the Treaty and in particular Articles 2,
4 and 5 which, together with Article 3, must always be observed because they establish
the fundamental objectives of the Community. Those provisions are binding
and must be read together if they are to be properly applied." 23
The first two decisions of 1955 offered the particular characteristic that the
initiators or applicants were two legal persons, i. e. Italian firms. It so happens that,
although the Treaty does allow proceedings for annulment to be started by private
persons, they are permitted to rely only on a very uncertain ground of annulment
known as "misuse of powers" a narrow interpretation of which would have meant,
in effect, that the Court was barring private individuals from access to Community
justice and reducing the scope of the remedy almost to zero.
However, brushing aside the view expressed by the Advocate General who had
been exhorting it to "resist the temptation for any court, especially if it is of last
instance, to make law accord with equity" the Court decided that for proceedings to
be admissible, it would suffice if the applicant could formally "allege misuse of
powers". To be allowed to plead, the plaintiff did not have to prove that there had
been misuse of powers, which was left for appraisal by the Court of the merits of
the case 24 . It was clearly the Court's intention to make sure that a private applicant
would be able to take individual action effectively and easily, which was far from
clear on the basis of the text of the Treaty on its own.
In 1956, in the first case of the year, there surfaced the capital concept of direct
applicability. After noting that certain trading practices were banned both by
Article 4 and by other articles in the Treaty, such as Article 67, the Court declared
that provisions relating to one and the same measure should be considered together,
for the sake of proper application upon the same occasion. In pursuit of its judgments
for the year 1954 the Court declared that "the provisions of Article 4 are sufficient
of themselves and are directly applicable when they are not restated in any
part of the Treaty". In practice, therefore, the "special charges imposed by the
Member States in any form whatsoever" referred to in Article 4 (c) of the Treaty
were henceforth banned.
That is how the fundamental principle of the direct applicability of Community
law came to be laid down and, consequently, the primacy of Community law over
conflicting domestic law. The potential for this principle, of course, was not to be
23. Case 8/57, 21 June 1958, [1957 and 1958] ECR 245.
24. Cases 3 and 4/54, 11 February 1955, [1954 to 1956] ECR 63 and 91. The text of the corresponding
article in the EEC Treaty (173) proved ultimately to be much more restrictive towards the individual,
and the Court was unable to interpret it extensively ; in which respect see, for example, Cases
16 and 17/62, 14 December 1962, [1962] ECR 471.