Bulletin n. 1-2/2014
November 2014
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Niels Petersen
    Karlsruhe Not Only Barks, But Finally Bites—Some Remarks on the OMT Decision of the German Constitutional Court
    in German Law Journal , vol. 15, issue 2 ,  2014 ,  321-327
    On 6 September 2012, the European Central Bank (ECB) published a press release on “Technical features of Outright Monetary Transactions.” In this press release, the ECB announced that it would purchase bonds of Member States participating in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF)/European Stability Mechanism (ESM) program on the secondary sovereign bond markets under certain conditions. Furthermore, it gave notice that there were no ex ante quantitative limits on the size of these outright monetary transactions (OMT). This OMT announcement of the ECB was challenged before the German Constitutional Court. In a 6:2 decision, the Court raised doubts with regards to the compatibility of the actions announced in the OMT press release with the rules governing the mandate of the ECB in the Treaty for the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), and referred the case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for a preliminary ruling. The relationship between the German Constitutional Court and the European Court of Justice has a long history. Karlsruhe has never fully accepted the absolute supremacy of the ECJ in matters of EU law. Instead, the German judges have always tried to influence the course of the European integration. This started with the Solange judgments of the Federal Constitutional Court, which initiated the development of a fundamental rights jurisprudence by the ECJ. In its judgments on the treaties of Maastricht and Lisbon, Karlsruhe tried to impose limits on the European integration project. In many respects, the OMT decision of the German Constitutional Court is a continuation of these previous developments. Karlsruhe claimed to have jurisdiction to review the actions of an EU institution, and the line of reasoning follows, to a considerable extent, the path of the established jurisprudence.
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