“Imagine a bunch of people building a house,” says Ieva Hūna. “One person puts on the roof, another builds one wall, while another builds the other wall. Everybody participates. When the house is ready, it collapses. Then there is a question of responsibility. Which of the builders should be considered responsible for the consequences of the house collapsing?”
Ieva, a doctoral researcher at the EUI Department of Law, studies a version of this problem in the real world. In the European Union, decisions are increasingly made by EU and national authorities acting together, each contributing a step in the process. But when the result is unlawful or infringes individuals’ rights the same question arises: Which builder do you hold responsible?
As Ieva explains, the EU’s court system assumes a clean separation. If a decision is flawed at the EU level, you challenge it before the Court of Justice of the European Union. If the problem lies with a national authority, you go to a national court. But this separation, she argues, often does not reflect how decisions are actually made.
EU administrative law scholars call these joint decision-making processes “composite procedures”. The term may sound technical, but the phenomenon, according to Ieva, is anything but niche. “Composite procedures are found almost in any area of EU law,” she says. “There is rarely an area where you would start digging into the legislation and not find a procedure like this.”
In her article in the Review of European Administrative Law, Ieva traces their reach across diverse fields. Banking, she notes, is one of the most prominent examples: Almost any decision in the European Banking Union involves the European Central Bank and national supervisory authorities working in tandem. The registration of protected food products, whether it is Italian parmigiano reggiano or Spanish jamón serrano, requires national authorities and the European Commission to assess and approve an application together. Resolving a failing bank requires the cooperation between the Single Resolution Board and national resolution authorities. Ieva identifies the same pattern in areas from environmental protection and pharmaceutical regulation to the control of state aid and the operations of Frontex at the EU’s external borders.
These procedures, Ieva is careful to stress, serve an important purpose. Member states are reluctant to hand full decision-making power to the EU, but leaving enforcement entirely to national authorities may not be sufficient to achieve common goals. “It is a very good compromise, which is efficient,” she says.
The difficulty arises when the house collapses.
The EU court system, Ieva explains, was never designed to oversee EU and national authorities working as one. The Court of Justice reviews EU decisions, national courts review national decisions, and the two operate separately. The administrations, meanwhile, have quietly evolved to function as one team. “The administration is going in one direction,” she says, “and the courts are going in another. And because they are going in separate directions but need to be compatible, that is where we get all of these problems.” EU administrative law scholarship describes this as the “mismatch” between the administration and the judiciary. The scale of the disconnect, she notes, is reflected in the fact that the Court of Justice only named composite procedures explicitly for the first time in 2023, despite the phenomenon existing for decades.
To show what this means in practice, she walks through the example of Oleificio Borelli, an Italian company in Liguria that applied for EU funding to build an oil mill. The Italian authorities found that the company did not qualify for the aid and forwarded their refusal to the European Commission, which then issued the final negative decision. When the Oleificio Borelli wanted to challenge the outcome, it faced a question with no clear answer: Who is responsible? “You go to the Court of Justice,” Ieva says, “and it says, well, it is a national decision. So you go to the national courts, and they might say, we have nothing to do with this, it was actually an EU decision.”
A more recent case, which Ieva analyses in her piece for the EU Law Live Weekend Edition, shows the problem at a much larger scale. The Irish Data Protection Authority investigated WhatsApp for potential breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation. Because WhatsApp operates across all EU member states, all national data protection authorities and the European Data Protection Board all contributed to the final decision. The result, as Ieva describes it, was “a mosaic of inputs”, a decision assembled from the reasoning of different authorities at different stages of the procedure. WhatsApp was fined €225 million. But when the company sought to challenge the decision, pinpointing a single “author” of the co-authored decision was, in Ieva’s analysis, extraordinarily difficult. WhatsApp, as part of Meta, had the resources to pursue parallel proceedings before the General Court and the Irish courts, to be safe in case either one declines.
Most individuals do not have such resources. The consequences are mostly human, Ieva notes, in the field of migration. Decisions on asylum and international protection can also involve these procedures. A person who has fled conflict, violence, or persecution and is seeking protection in the EU may find that the decision on their case was shaped by authorities from multiple legal orders. If that decision is wrong, they face the same jurisdictional maze. But unlike WhatsApp, backed by one of the world’s largest technology companies, an asylum seeker is unlikely to have the means to hire specialised lawyers or pursue parallel proceedings in two court systems. “A person seeking protection in the EU is the least likely to have sufficient resources to legally navigate such situations,” Ieva says. “And then it is really tragic.”
What surprised her most during the research, she says, was the sheer extent of what she found. From the outside, the EU can appear as two separate spheres: national authorities on one side, “mystical Brussels” on the other. “You kind of expect that they are cooperating,” Ieva says. “But what would surprise you is how much they work as this single team of builders and how they can really sometimes not be separated at all.”
Her thesis, titled “Towards an Integrated Judiciary”, argues that the courts need to catch up. If the administrations have learnt to work together, Ieva reasons, then the courts that oversee them must develop tools to do the same. This would not mean merging the Court of Justice and national courts into a single institution. She proposes cooperation and coordination mechanisms that would allow them to function as an integrated judiciary when a case demands it. “Individuals should not be left without protection and the administrations should not escape the scrutiny of the courts just because they decided the case jointly,” Ieva adds.
She acknowledges that this might face resistance from both sides. Member states may see closer judicial coordination as an encroachment on sovereignty. The Court of Justice has long guarded its authority over the interpretation of EU law and overseeing the EU administration. But the alternative, she argues, is a gap between how decisions are made and how they are reviewed that will only grow, to the detriment of the protection of individuals’ rights. “With every crisis, with every piece of legislation that is put out there, the EU just gets more and more active,” she says. “And there is more and more necessity to cooperate with member states.”
Ieva came to this topic from the courtroom rather than the classroom. After completing her studies in EU law, she spent several years working in the Latvian public sector, including with the legal team that represents the Latvian government before the Court of Justice. The work was dynamic, she recalls, but it left little room for the kind of sustained thinking the problems demanded. “Practice and especially litigation is challenging, dynamic and fun in that way,” she says, “but it does not allow you to stop and think about issues in a deeper way.”
The thread that led to her PhD began during her master’s studies at Leiden University. Her thesis on the European Public Prosecutor’s Office surfaced a problem that she only later recognised as a composite procedure problem. “I started to look at this problem,” she recalls, “and then I discovered that this is not only the prosecutor’s office. This exact problem, just in different variations and different contexts, is found in all kinds of areas of EU law.” A friend who had studied at the EUI described it as a place of extreme intellectual freedom. For Ieva, the decision to come to Florence was, as she puts it, “a no-brainer.”
The EUI turned out to be what her friend had promised. Ieva describes lunches on the Salviati or Badia terraces that stretch for two hours, as researchers from across departments and disciplines share ideas over coffee. “Sometimes these two-hour lunches are as valuable as sitting at a lecture,” she says, “because the people here are just so diverse and so brilliant.”
But the warmth of those conversations does not make her forget what is at stake. The problems she studies are not abstract. They affect real people, and they are growing.
The builders, Ieva believes, will keep building together. And the houses they build, whether they concern banking, data protection, migration, or the food on our tables, will keep shaping the lives of people across the EU. Sooner or later, the courts will have to learn to judge together.
“You cannot just focus on administrative efficiency,” she says. “You need to stop and think about what happens when a person’s rights are violated.”
Ieva Hūna is a doctoral researcher at the EUI Department of Law. Her thesis, “Towards an Integrated Judiciary: Composite Procedures and Their Judicial Review by the CJEU and Member State Courts”, is supervised by Urska Sadl.
Her recent publications include “Composite Procedures: The Maturation of a Cross-Jurisdictional Phenomenon” in the Review of European Administrative Law and “The CJEU and the Ship of Theseus: Acts of Mixed Authorship in Composite Administrative Procedures” in the EU Law Live Weekend Edition.
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