UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

When a modern – or for the first time a real – constitutional jurisdiction emerged in Germany and France in the 1950s, no one thought that these new institutions would one day become part of a “European constitutional court network”, that there would be an ECJ to which national courts of every in-stance could refer questions of interpretation of the ever-increasing body of EU law, or an ECHR that would watch over compliance with the ECHR as a permanent court with the right of individual complaint. Since the initially reluctant acceptance of the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) and the Conseil constitutionnel (CC) to be part of this network, they have been struggling for their supposedly ‘own’ influence. On the one hand, this happens ‘outwardly’ in relation to the often seemingly overpowering “competitors” from Strasbourg and Luxembourg, but on the other hand also ‘inwardly’ vis-à-vis the ordinary courts. The constitutional courts have to deal with ordinary jurisdictions that are tempted by Union law and, in France, especially by the ECHR, to the hubris of deviating from the positions of the formerly unchallenged guardians of the constitution. Moreover, this resistance is inter- or supranationally based and thus, according to the traditional distribution of competences, beyond the scope of control of the constitutional court. 

The aim of the dissertation is to examine whether and by which procedural means the FCC and the CC attempt to assert themselves against the ordinary courts in areas overlaid with Conven-tion and EU law, to work out the consequences of this case law for their relationship to the ordi-nary courts and to embed them in the broader context of the references to European procedural law.