On 29 June 2026, the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs (AFCO) rapporteur Charlie Weimers (ECR) published a draft report, to be presented at a public hearing on July 15, on “The Institutional Framework of the European Union and its Interaction with National Authorities in the Application of Union Law, with Particular Reference to Article 19 TEU”.

At first glance, the document reads as a technical set of déjà-vu recommendations on how the Court of Justice and national courts could better interact through improved transparency. Most of its individual proposals have long been subjects of academic discussion, from how to improve the Court’s procedural transparency (e.g. case-allocation criteria, rapporteur choice, judicial formation) to the formulation of substantive concerns (e.g. greater clarity on interpretative methods, the absence of dissenting opinions, more frequent reliance on Advocates General). Yet behind calls for a “more transparent and objective Court of Justice” lies a long list of direct, including ad personam, sometimes random, critiques of how the EU interprets, organises and exercises its mandate (down to French as the exclusive language for internal deliberation). More consequentially, the report’s political preferences reach beyond the Court’s daily operation into its constitutional role in guaranteeing national judicial independence, making this, set against the current political climate, the Parliament’s most comprehensive attempt in recent years to redefine the constitutional conditions of the Court’s judicial function.

This post argues that, taken together, these proposals would upset the constitutional balance governing judicial independence by compromising the Court’s ability to review and sanction instances of illegally appointed judges or captured courts, while promoting, beneath the vocabulary of transparency and accountability, a specific model of constitutional adjudication, that of a single national constitutional court: Germany’s Bundesverfassungsgericht.

The Court is not without responsibility here: its longstanding resistance to internal transparency reforms, documented elsewhere over the past decade, has furnished the opening this report now exploits. The Court’s failure to institutionalise greater openness in its judicial governance and the more recent embrace of an interpretation style hinting to longer, more argumentative reasoning (most lately e.g. here and here), left it exposed to a broader political project seeking to redefine the constitutional limits of judicial independence within the Union.

What the Report Says (And How)

The European Parliament has traditionally positioned itself as a champion of the Court’s role in upholding the rule of law and safeguarding judicial independence within the Union. It triggered the Article 7(1) TEU procedure against Hungary in 2018, and, as co-defendant alongside the Council, successfully defended the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism in Luxembourg against Hungary and Poland’s annulment actions. It even sued the Commission itself for failing to apply that mechanism against Hungary (later withdrawn once the Commission acted), while its Civil Liberties (LIBE) Committee kept sustained pressure on the Commission through recurring reports and resolutions on judicial independence in Poland and Hungary. The Parliament even endorsed the CJEU’s most ambitious reform – doubling the number of its members at the General Court – as demanded by the Court despite limited evidence justifying it. When measured against that track record, this draft report marks an abrupt reversal of that sympathetic and supportive stance.

The casus belli for the report’s unusual challenge to the Court is provided by its own case law on judicial independence. Built on Article 19 TEU, this jurisprudence has led the Court to declare itself competent to assess the independence of national judges and courts applying and interpreting EU law, thereby subjecting them to “common standards” of independence. While Recital M concedes that this case law “has contributed to the protection of judicial independence and the rule of law in certain Member States”, it immediately notes that “it has at the same time raised important questions concerning the relationship between Union and Member State competences”. This – according to the report – required “national courts to disregard decisions of constitutional courts” and “questioned the ability of certain national judicial bodies to participate in the preliminary ruling procedure and developed the principle of non-regression…” (Recital N). No matter that the Court itself found in its Grand Chamber judgment of 18 December 2025 that Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal no longer meets the requirements of an independent and impartial tribunal established by law, owing to serious irregularities in the appointment of three of its members and its President in 2015 and 2016.

To confine or bar further development of this case law, the report argues that a Court “exercis[ing] functions of such significance” must meet “particularly high standards of transparency, methodological consistency, procedural legitimacy and institutional accountability” (Recital Q), with “precise doctrinal limits and full respect for the constitutional responsibilities of the Member States” (Recital 9).

Behind that seemingly innocuous call for a “more transparent and objective Court” lies a staunch line of attack built around three points. The first targets internal governance, that is how cases are assigned, judges designated, and formations composed. The report treats the absence of “objective, predetermined and transparent rules” for case allocation (Recital U) as an affront to the “lawful judge” guarantee under Article 47 CFR and Article 6 ECHR, and calls for “a review of the concentration of procedural and organisational powers within the office of the President” (para. 14). The latter is framed as due process, but in fact an unprecedented challenge to the presidency’s authority. Yet the alternative to case-by-case attribution is automaticity, which Article 47 nowhere requires, and which would strip the President’s office of its essential prerogative: weighing cases against criteria like a member’s specialisation, and efficiency considerations. Chamber allocation, moreover, is made not by the President alone but collectively, by the weekly Réunion Générale.

The second point shifts attention from judicial governance (how the Court operates) to judicial reasoning (how it reasons). The report criticises “broad teleological reasoning” (Recital V) and the absence of a “clearly articulated hierarchy of interpretative methods” then advances three demands: dissenting and concurring opinions with published voting results (paras 19-20); an end to dispensing with Advocates General’s opinions in sensitive cases (para. 21); and scrutiny of the Court’s “exclusive use of French” which risks “privileging…particular modes of legal reasoning” (Recital Y, para. 22). Taken together, these risk stripping the Court of the interpretive discretion its authority rests on: exposing every step of its reasoning to politicisation would produce not a more legitimate Court but a weaker one. Ultimately, this reveals the true aim pursued by this report: not greater judicial transparency, but a different Court altogether, closer to the one Member State tribunal – the German Federal Constitutional Court – than to any other national court.

The third point is by far the most consequential as it reaches the Court’s relationship with national judicial authorities. The report builds its case by citing a list of national pushbacks, from Denmark’s Ajos, Germany’s PSPP, France’s Cohn-Bendit, to Czechia’s Holubec, to which it adds Poland’s K 3/21 (para. 3). Yet the equivalence does not hold: whatever one thinks of their reasoning, the first four were courts, as they met the requirements of an independent and impartial tribunal established by law; the same could not be said of the body behind K 3/21. As anticipated, the ECtHR had already found the Polish Tribunal’s post-2015 composition irregular in Xero Flor v. Poland, and the Grand Chamber has since ruled the body which issued K 3/21 is no court within the meaning of EU law at all. Against this selective reconstruction, the report proposes a “reciprocal constitutional dialogue mechanism” letting national courts submit observations before rulings on constitutional identity or EU competence (para. 23), subordinating the Court’s independence to the prior acquiescence of the very actors it is meant to constrain.

The Court’s Own Hand In This

None of this exonerates the Court. The first line of criticism carries force because it identifies a genuine, self-inflicted deficiency. As I have shown elsewhere, the Court remains subject to institutional openness like any other EU institution: Article 1 TEU requires decisions be taken “as openly as possible” and Article 15(1) TFEU extends that duty to all institutions. Article 15(3) TFEU shields the Court’s proceedings only from the general right of document access, a narrow exemption, not an escape from the broader obligation. A combined reading of Articles 1 and 15 suggests that the Court’s discretion over, inter alia, case allocation, the designation of reporting judges, the constitution of chambers and the practice of dispensing with Advocates General’s opinions can no longer be treated as “cuisine interne” immune from legal scrutiny. The Court could have operationalised this duty through its own Rules of Procedure, publishing objective allocation criteria, and clarifying the line between administrative and judicial functions. It failed to. Had it acted, as required by the post-Lisbon openness obligations, the grievances behind the first line of attack would largely not have arisen; instead they remained open questions, available for a hostile rapporteur to recast as evidence of an unaccountable judiciary.

What’s at Stake

Even as a non-binding resolution, this report would shape the next revision of the Court’s Statute, normalising the idea that Article 19 TEU enforcement against captured judiciaries is “overreach” rather than a legitimate exercise of the Court’s constitutional role. The consequences are threefold: a weakened Article 19 doctrine affords less protection the next time a government threatens the independence of its own judiciary; a reciprocal dialogue mechanism gives courts whose independence is itself disputed a voice that functions as a chilling effect at best, a de facto veto at worst; and it puts in question the ordinary citizen’s guarantee that an independent Court of Justice remains the court of last resort against national violations of EU-conferred rights.

Conclusion

This draft report confirms what I have long feared. The Court’s historic reluctance to open up its own governance, notwithstanding what the post-Lisbon constitutional arrangement requires of it, has left it exposed to an unprecedented political critique of how it delivers justice within the EU. Any of the grey areas of discretion enjoyed by the Court, and/or by its President – from case allocation to the constitution of judicial formations – ought to have been rendered objective and intelligible to external scrutiny long before the Weimers report weaponised that discretion into a “political liability”.

On 15 July, a report that has so far attracted little public attention will gain institutional visibility at a public hearing whose composition deserves scrutiny in its own right. In a debate concerning the legitimacy of the Court’s constitutional authority, in its relation with national courts, AFCO has assembled a panel representing sharply divergent views on Article 19 TEU and the limits of judicial integration. Such plurality may be valuable, but it also raises questions about how Parliament selects experts who have not merely studied this issue but actively steered it.

Given the stakes, both this report and the process accompanying its adoption warrant closer scrutiny from legal academia, civil society, and public opinion alike. AFCO and JURI members committed to an independent judiciary have until the November committee vote to mobilise a counter-resolution (without the need to amend – but directly replace – the Weimers report under Art. 188 RoP). Civil society, legal academia, and the profession should not await that vote to make their position known.