Teresa Cicala v Regione Siciliana.
Date: 2011-12-21
15. Under Article 267 TFEU the Court has jurisdiction to give preliminary rulings concerning the interpretation of the Treaties and acts of the institutions of the Union. In the context of the cooperation between the Court and the national courts established by Article 267 TFEU, it is for the national courts alone to assess, in view of the special features of each case, both the necessity of a preliminary ruling in order to enable them to give their judgment and the relevance of the questions they put to the Court (see, to that effect, Case C‑310/10 Agafiţei and Others [2011] ECR I‑5989, paragraphs 24 and 25 and the case-law cited).
16. Consequently, when questions submitted by national courts concern the interpretation of a provision of EU law, the Court is, in principle, obliged to give a ruling (Case C‑3/04 Poseidon Chartering [2006] ECR I‑2505, paragraph 15; Case C‑203/09 Volvo Car Germany [2010] ECR I‑10721, paragraph 24; and Agafiţei and Others , paragraph 26).
17. In accordance with that case-law, the Court has repeatedly held that it has jurisdiction to give preliminary rulings on questions concerning provisions of EU law in situations in which the facts of the case in the main proceedings fell beyond the field of application of EU law but in which those provisions of EU law had been rendered applicable by domestic law due to a renvoi made by that law to the content of those provisions. In those cases, the provisions of domestic law incorporating provisions of EU law did not limit the application of the latter (Case C‑130/95 Gilroy [1997] ECR I‑4291, paragraph 23, and Case C‑28/95 Leur-Bloem [1997] ECR I‑4161, paragraph 27 and case-law cited).
18. The Court has stated in that regard that when, in regulating purely internal situations, domestic legislation seeks to adopt the same solutions as those adopted in EU law in order, for example, to avoid discrimination against foreign nationals or any distortion of competition or to provide for a single procedure in comparable situations, it is clearly in the interest of the Union that, in order to forestall future differences of interpretation, provisions or concepts taken from EU law should be interpreted uniformly, irrespective of the circumstances in which they are to apply ( Agafiţei and Others , paragraph 39 and the case-law cited).
19. Thus, an interpretation, by the Court, of provisions of EU law in purely internal situations is warranted on the ground that they have been made applicable by national law directly and unconditionally (see, to that effect, Case C‑346/93 Kleinwort Benson [1995] ECR I‑615, paragraph 16, and Case C‑280/06 ETI and Others [2007] ECR I‑10893, paragraph 25), in order to ensure that internal situations and situations governed by EU law are treated in the same way (see, to that effect, Poseidon Chartering , paragraph 17, and Case C‑217/05 Confederación Española de Empresarios de Estaciones de Servicio [2006] ECR I‑11987, paragraph 22).
28. In that regard, it should be noted that the Corte dei conti, sezione giurisdizionale per la Regione Siciliana, does not indicate at all whether that renvoi has the consequence of setting aside the national rules relating to the duty to state reasons and of replacing them with the second paragraph of Article 296 TFEU and Article 41(2)(c) of the Charter, which are addressed, indeed, according to their wording, not to the Member States but solely to the EU institutions and bodies, or indeed with other rules of EU law relating to the duty to state reasons, even when it is a purely internal situation at issue, in order to treat purely internal situations and those governed by EU law in the same manner.