The EFTA Court: An Actor in the European Judicial Dialogue

The vertical dialogue with the national courts of the EEA/EFTA States, in particular the Supreme Courts, has assisted the EFTA Court in developing its case law concerning effect and State liability. Through this jurisprudence, EEA homogeneity in the field of effect and State liability has been maintained. The EEA Main Agreement has been implemented in the domestic legal orders of the EFTA States. EEA secondary law is being implemented in an ongoing process. The same holds true for the rulings of the EFTA Court. There has, to this writer\u27s knowledge, never been a case in which a national court refused to set aside a conflicting rule of domestic law, at least not in a vertical context. That fact is also important from a reciprocity perspective. With respect to the horizontal dialogue with the Community Courts, one must remember that in its Opinion 1/91 on the first version of the EEA Agreement the ECJ struck down a provision according to which the Community courts would have been under an obligation to take into account the case law of the EEA courts. In practice, the Community courts have shown openness in cases in which they agree with the outcome as well as with the reasoning of an EFTA Court decision