La funzione giurisdizionale in ambito europeo

The “jurisdictional function” can be defined, in general, as the activity of the courts, which have a peculiar position of independence, aimed at implementing and declaring the law with regard to specific and disputed cases. Moreover, it should be noted that the attempt to find a unitary and unambiguous notion of “jurisdictional function” has not given satisfactory results. In particular, whilst the “essential nucleus” of that notion appears to be the presence of a judge and the activity of law enforcement in specific cases, it seems to me that the notion in question can be partially diversified depending, for example, on the reference “geographical context”. In this sense, the expression “jurisdictional function in Europe” could refer to all the courts operating within the European legal order and to the activities of enforcement of supranational law that they perform, being now required to use a variety of sources of law, since, in addition to national laws, there are the rules from the European Union and the European Convention on Human Rights. This work aims to analyze the relationships between the national judges and the two European Courts (the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights), which, respectively, implement and interpret the European rules, in order to try to understand whether it is possible to find a “European jurisdictional function” emerging from these relationships, or at least a sort of “European judiciary” in which all the courts, national and European, contribute to ensure an advanced and “integrated” form of rights protection.