Principles of Responsibility within the European Community

The purpose of this article is to examine the principles that are applied by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to the responsibility of member states of the European Community (EC)1 for the implementation of their obligations arising from the EC Treaty and to compare these principles with those that are applied by the Court in cases concerning the responsibility for the implementation of international obligations arising from international agreements to which the Community is considered to be a party. The idea is to discover the extent of the parallelism between the principles applied to the former and the later obligations. As will be seen, the case law of the Court shows that the principles concerning the responsibility of member states for fulfilling obligations in international agreements concluded by the Community are similar to those that are applied to their responsibility for obligations arising from the EC Treaty, as both of these are international treaties subject to the supervision of an international court, namely the ECJ, which has to act in accordance with the relevant international laws.2 Finally, in the last section, I will try to answer the question if the Community and the member states can be held internationally responsible vis-à-vis a non-member state if the Community fails to fulfill an obligation undertaken in an international agreement made with that state.