Internal Judicial Independence in the EU and Ghosts from the Socialist Past: Why the Court of Justice Should Not Follow AG Pikamäe in Hann-Invest

Editorial Comment: Nika Bačić Selanec, Assistant Professor at the Department of European Public Law, University of Zagreb – Faculty of Law, holder of the Jean Monnet Module on ‘EU Constitutional Law and Methodology’, and Executive Editor of the Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy Davor Petrić, Postdoctoral Researcher and Senior Assistant at the Department of European Public Law, University of Zagreb – Faculty of Law, and Executive Editor of the Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy The editorial comment discusses the preliminary reference and the Opinion of Advocate General Pikamäe in Joined Cases C-554/21, C-622/21 and C-727/21 Hann-Invest, which is currently pending before the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice. In the preliminary reference – the first reference on the state of the rule of law and independence of the judiciary in Croatia – the referring national court questioned whether the Croatian mechanism for ensuring consistency of case law of second-instance national courts and the Supreme Court complies with Article 19(1) TEU. Unlike the AG, this comment argues it does not. DOI: 10.3935/cyelp.20.2024.565 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution − Non-Commercial − No Derivatives 4.0 International License. Suggested citation: N Bačić Selanec and D Petrić, ‘Editorial Comment: Internal Judicial Independence in the EU and Ghosts from the Socialist Past: Why the Court of Justice Should Not Follow AG Pikamäe in Hann-Invest’ (2024) 20 CYELP 155.