THE PRELIMINARY RULING PROCEDURE OF THE COURT OF JUSTICE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION AND DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF MULTILINGUAL JURISPRUDENCE

Abstract

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is responsible for the judicial
function and also is responsible for the implementation and interpretation of European Union
law. In certain circumstances, it also appears as a creator of the law through its practice,
creating general principles that are later translated into the EU law through the adoption of
legislation by the institutions. With its decisions and judgments, the CJEU aims to achieve
the same legal effects in each language version of its judgments and through them to ensure
a uniform application and interpretation of the EU law. However, court rulings, which are
binding on both the institutions and the member-states, are the result of collegial decisions
made by lawyers-linguists in a language that is not normally their mother tongue. In addition,
they are the result of various permutations related to the required legal translation vis-à-vis the
Court’s working language and the official languages of the EU.
The paper aims to present this issue and analyse the language policy of the CJEU, which
is superficially regulated by Article 342 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European
Union, Article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which provides for the protection of
linguistic diversity, Council Regulation 1/1958, as well as Article 64 of the Statute of the Court.
Multilingualism is a problem in terms of the authenticity of judgments and judgments of the
Court, their meaning and correct interpretation, which creates challenges for the acceptance
of the Court’s case law in the member-states, which seems to be adequately addressed by the
Court’s translation policy.