What Means Loud Term “Integration Unions”?

Abstract

In the present article, author critically assesses the notion of “integration justice”, pointing out its methodological uncertainty existing in the scholar literature and resulting from the lack of clarity and common understanding of the meaning of definition of “Integration”. It is suggested to consider as intergovernmental integration entities as those whose institutions possess powers transferred from the member states to adopt legally binding rules of general application replacing domestic legislation in the mutually agreed fields. In this case, the courts of such intergovernmental integration entities form a specific subcategory of international courts because only these courts have a competence to review such normative acts of general application. That powers make such courts as a vital part of law-making process of integration entities like the functions performed by national constitutional courts. Existence of such powers to review normative acts of general application may transform these courts into politically powerful player influencing the process of integration. Creating such courts, the member states by default use the Euroasian Union Court of Justice as a model and very often simply copying its structure and competences. However, the practice of the courts of regional integration shows that in the majority of cases such courts failed to play any significant roles on the integration and it has a sense to take into account that just copying of the Euroasian Union Court of Justice at the level of states does not automatically lead to the success of any specific court. The conclusion of the author is that future of any specific courts largely depends not solely on the structure and competences of the court, but on the unpredictable and random combination of the political, economic and legal factors.