Legal remedies in the proceedings before the Court of Justice of the European Union

Legal remedies applied in the proceedings before the Court of Justice of the European Union have some distinctive features as compared to the legal remedies used in the national judicial systems. At first, the communitarian justice system originally did not envisage the possibility of filing an appeal with this Court as a regular legal remedy but there were other remedies that could be pursued in respect of the judgments issued by the Court. After the establishment of the Court of First Instance, the Procedural Law of the European Union introduced the possibility of filing an appeal with the Court of Justice against the judgments of the Court of First Instance. Later, the Court of First Instance became competent to decide on appeals against the judgments rendered by the judicial panels, which were established in the meantime. The Court of First Instance and judicial panels reserved the possibility of using other legal remedies against the final decisions rendered by these judicial authorities. In this respect, the Lisbon Treaty did not bring any significant changes, except that the Court of First Instance was renamed into the General Court whereas the judicial panels were designated as specialized courts. Taking into account the system of legal remedies recognized by the Procedural Law of the European Union, the first part of the paper deals with appeals as a regular legal instrument for bringing the case before a higher instance court which is to review the judgment of a lower instance court, including appeals against the decisions of the General Court and specialized courts. In the second part of the paper, the authors focus on the legal remedies which are awarded by the same court that issued the judgment. This category includes the application of a third party and revision, which may be considered as extraordinary legal remedies, as well as the objection against the judgment by default, judgment interpretation, judgment rectification and supplementing the judgment, which are considered to be extraordinary procedural remedies.