COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE

The Court of First Instance celebrated its 10th anniversary on 19 October with a symposium which, fortunately, was less celebratory than critical. The morning session, on "judicial protection of individuals", quickly focused in on improvement of procedure and revealed some interesting side effects of recent changes. Thus, state aid cases are now almost exclusively routed to the CFI through direct private actions under Art. 230. This replaces the old double action: by the Member State before the ECJ and the private party before the CFI. Now the ECJ stays its proceedings and leaves it to the CFI to deal with the case. To complete the procedural merger, the addressee Member State now intervenes in the CFI action, which is a further innovation. Of particular interest was the acceptance, even encouragement, of a move towards orality as a means of reducing pre-trial delays. Already the oral hearing was described as "very important"; and it was again emphasised as an essential ingredient of a fast track procedure. Thinking on this is advancing very rapidly, and one francophone speaker urged the need, if the oral hearing was to develop its potential, to "encadrer la plaidoirie par les questions". Prior to that stage, the written procedure might be drastically curtailed (limited to 25 pages?) and in any case organised by more drastic use of measures of inquiry and in particular a pre-trial meeting to examine points which were accepted or disputed so as to concentrate the debate on what was essential. This, and the desirability of actively promoting settlement as the normal outcome, reminded one strongly of the Strasbourg procedure. As there is about to be a joint meeting of the Strasbourg Judges and the Luxembourg Judges in a few weeks time, it would be pleasing to think that they might discuss mutual lessons to be learned from their respective procedures. But that is probably asking for the moon.