Romania can’t bar judges from checking whether national rules are in line with European Union law, the bloc’s top court said in a ruling amid growing numbers of challenges to the EU’s legal order, according to Bloomberg.
“Doing so would undermine the principle of the primacy of EU law and undermine the effectiveness of the cooperation between the bloc’s top court and national tribunals,” the EU Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday.
The judgment follows decisions by the highest courts in Poland and Hungary in the past year that cast doubt on a key premise of the bloc’s founding treaty. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal last year put the bloc in a bind when it ruled that the nation’s constitution overrides some EU laws.
A Romanian court last year sought the guidance from the bloc’s top tribunal in Luxembourg after judges found themselves penalized for questioning a decision by the country’s Constitutional Court to approve national rules, and their validity in line with EU law.