This Week in Luxembourg

This week there are two very cool Grand Chamber cases:

On Tuesday, the Court agreed with AG Kokott that the Premier League is not allowed to re-establish national borders for its satellite decoders. If Mrs. Murphy, pub owner in Portsmouth, wants to use a Greek decoder because they’re cheaper, she can. Football Association Premier League and Others Cf. bbc.co.uk.

On Thursday, AG Kokott released her opinion in the Grand Chamber case of Air Transport Association of America and others concerning the question whether the airlines will have to start handing over emissions credits while they’re still on the runway in San Francisco (instead of only when they’re flying over EU territory). I am in no position to judge the AG’s conclusion saying that the directive is compatible with the Chicago convention, but call me sceptical about her conclusion that it is not unlawfully extraterritorial.

The 8^th chamber had two food hygiene cases under Regulation 852/2004, taking a relatively relaxed approach in both. In Astrid Preissl they ruled that no high-tech specially devoted basin for cleaning hands was necessary, while in Albrecht and Others they were not overly concerned with the possibility that in a self-service bakery a potential purchaser might have touched or sneezed upon the foodstuffs.

In Graf and Engel, two Swiss citizens again suffered the consequence of not being European citizens. In limited circumstances, Austria is allowed to object to a lease of agricultural land.

The wheels of justice are moving slowly. In 1994, Italy created a scheme of state aid, which was judged unlawful by the Commission in 1999, a decision that was upheld by the General Court in 2008, which was in turn upheld by the Court of Justice in June 2011. Now, Italy is back before the ECJ again because they have not complied with the Commission’s decision yet. (It was not suspended pending examination by the courts.) Commission v. Italy (FR, IT)

In the anti-dumping case of GLS (NL, DE, FR), the Commission was a little bit (too) lazy when it came to determining the normal value of citrus fruits imported from China, where there is no “normal price” since it is not a functioning market economy. As a result, AG Bot recommends that Commission Regulation 642/2008 should be annulled.

In the Italian raw tobacco cartel case, three companies appealed to the General Court. One (IT, FR) received a reduction in its fine because the Commission failed to prove it had been part of the cartel for the full period claimed, one had its case dismissed because it had gone bankrupt in the meantime, and one (IT, FR) simply lost.

P.S. the archive of these emails is here.