Graham Butler

The Court is a curious judicial actor in EU external relations that continues to evolve with the passage of time. Whether it was the creation of the ERTA doctrine, or the more recent Opinion 2/13 on Accession of the Union to the European Convention on Human Rights in 2014, the Court has been incrementally shaping the law of EU external relations, and determining the manner in which the Union may enter into formal international relations. Understanding the Court’s importance in this field has been done time and again, but yet, consideration of the pre-ratification judicial review option, available to certain actors for envisaged international agreements through Article 218(11) TFEU, is deserving of more attention to better understand the manner in which the Court has, does, and will continue to shape the external dimension of the Union through international agreements. Faced with difficult choices in many cases, and being forced to wade into institutional debates over competence and the autonomy of the Union’s legal order, this chapter underlines the important role that the Court has played in external relations prior to international agreements being entered into, and seeks to carve out a formula for how ex ante judicial review can work in developing the Union into an even more enhanced global actor, through its own unique judicial order.