Baudenbacher criticises political influence at EU court

A large share of the judges at the European Court of Justice come from political rather than legal backgrounds, former EFTA Court President Carl Baudenbacher said, according to mbl.is.

Baudenbacher made the remarks after giving a speech on the European Union at Sjálfstæðissalurinn, a hall at Austurvöllur, on Monday. Former Icelandic President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson asked him to explain the difference between the European Court of Justice and the EFTA Court.

Baudenbacher said the European Court of Justice has 27 judges and around 3,000 employees, as well as a gold courtroom that has been compared with an Arab hotel. He described it as the world’s second most powerful court, after the United States Supreme Court.

You cannot ultimately control the court, Baudenbacher said. He argued that many of its judges were not lawyers, judges from member states or practising lawyers from those countries, but former foreign ministers.

He said this was a serious problem because the judges had been shaped more by political than legal environments.

Baudenbacher also criticised the court for holding secret votes. In his view, this gives it greater power because individual judges cannot be held accountable for their votes.

He said French is the court’s official language, meaning every judge must have at least one French speaker among their staff. He also argued that language and ways of thinking were connected, saying that the French way of thinking therefore had a direct influence on the court’s judges.

Baudenbacher said the European Court of Justice often provided much less clear explanations for its rulings than the EFTA Court. EFTA judges, he said, had to explain and justify their decisions to member states rather than simply saying that something was the case without explaining why.