Judicial Proceedings in the European Union
An automatically updated overview of the EU’s judicial activity
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is the principal judicial institution of the EU. It consists of two courts: the higher-instance Court of Justice (CJ) and the lower-instance General Court (GC). There used to be a third court, the Civil Service Tribunal (CST), which was abolished and whose jurisdiction was transferred to the GC.
This page gives a real-time overview of the EU courts’ output and engagement with national courts through the preliminary ruling procedure. It relies on data collected via the eurlex package for R.1
As of 8 June 2026, EU courts have delivered 33,064 decisions in about 49,550 cases submitted to them since 1953. According to public records, 1,365 cases are currently pending before the Court of Justice and 1,543 before the General Court.
Data as of 2026-06-08 08:25 UTC
Number of cases
Even more than any other branch of the EU, the CJEU’s caseload changed dramatically over the course of European integration. We can visualize the annual caseload of the three EU courts since 1953.
The increase in the CJ’s and GC’s caseloads was mostly gradual. The outsourcing of the civil service agenda to the CST did not prevent the GC’s caseload from rising during its period of operation.
Forecasting
As most other organisations, EU courts operate under a budget constraint while facing some uncertainty about their future workload. With information on the number of cases received in the past in hand, we can build a simple autoregressive model that predicts this year’s and next year’s CJ caseload.
The model uses lags 1, 2 and 3 of CJ caseload plus a 3-year lag of GC caseload (since CJ caseload is linked to GC’s through appeal procedures):
\[ Y_{t}^{CJ} = \beta_0 + \beta_1 Y_{t-1}^{CJ} + \beta_2 Y_{t-2}^{CJ} + \beta_3 Y_{t-3}^{CJ} + \beta_4 Y_{t-3}^{GC} + \epsilon_t \]
The parameters are estimated via Gaussian or Poisson regression.2
| OLS | Poisson | |
|---|---|---|
| + p < 0.1, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001 | ||
| (Intercept) | 186.592* | 5.796*** |
| [23.356, 349.828] | [5.698, 5.895] | |
| lag1_CJ | -0.033 | -0.000 |
| [-0.480, 0.414] | [-0.000, 0.000] | |
| lag2_CJ | 0.289 | 0.000*** |
| [-0.098, 0.676] | [0.000, 0.001] | |
| lag3_CJ | 0.065 | 0.000 |
| [-0.349, 0.478] | [-0.000, 0.000] | |
| lag3_GC | 0.462** | 0.001*** |
| [0.156, 0.768] | [0.001, 0.001] | |
| Num.Obs. | 25 | 25 |
| R2 | 0.854 | |
| R2 Adj. | 0.825 | |
| AIC | 280.5 | 310.3 |
| BIC | 287.8 | 316.4 |
| Log.Lik. | -134.231 | -150.159 |
| RMSE | 51.95 | 51.31 |
Both Gaussian and Poisson regression yield comparable predictions for 2026 (1028 versus 1147 cases).
Decisions
The number of cases received is not identical to the number of judicial decisions produced. Some cases are withdrawn or otherwise discontinued, others are joined and decided together. The EU judicial system distinguishes between different types of public decisions, of which judgments and orders are the two most common.
The four main procedure types are preliminary rulings (Art 267 TFEU), annulment procedures (Art 263), infringement proceedings (Art 258) and staff cases. The CJ has been handing down a seemingly ever-increasing number of preliminary rulings on questions from national courts.
Decisions can be further classified by the deciding court formation. The most important cases at the CJ are decided by more than ten judges in the Grand Chamber; on special occasions, the CJ even sits as the Full Court. Most cases are decided by a panel of five judges.
Each decision is assigned a judge-rapporteur. This judge has the primary responsibility for drafting the decision. The main predictor of how many decisions a judge writes is the length of their tenure.
Preliminary references
Historically the most important subset of CJEU cases comes through the preliminary ruling procedure (Art 267 TFEU). The most well-known CJ decisions, such as Costa v ENEL or Cassis de Dijon, originated in references from national courts.
References from national courts are very unevenly distributed geographically. By far the highest number of references has come from Germany. There is a relationship between length of EU membership and total references.
Referral activity has increased over time in most countries as the CJEU and its preliminary-ruling procedure gained prominence. Note that the data here comes from closed cases only, so many recent referrals are still pending.
Cite
Ovádek, M. euverse: Judicial Proceedings in the European Union. Accessed 8 June 2026. Available at https://michalovadek.github.io/euverse/trackers/eu-court.html.
Footnotes
Because neither Eur-Lex nor Curia contains the complete record of all court proceedings and documents, the data below should be viewed as a reasonable approximation of the true state of the world. The IUROPA project is attempting to create more comprehensive datasets.↩︎
Because we are working with count data, Poisson regression should be in principle more appropriate.↩︎