The DialogUE Project
Researchers from Masaryk University completed a three-year grant project titled Judicial Dialogue in EU Matters in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (DialogUE). The project ran from January 2022 to December 2024 and it aimed to analyse all cases submitted to the Court of Justice of the EU by Czech and Slovak courts in the first 20 years of these countries' membership in the EU, i.e. from 1 May 2004 to 30 April 2024. During this period, Czech courts submitted 122 references and Slovak courts 86 references, i.e. 208 cases in total.
The team analysed the Czech & Slovak cases at three levels:
- at the stage of the references submitted by national courts,
- at the stage of the ECJ’s responses,
- at the stage of the follow-up decisions by the national courts.
The original grant proposal can be downloaded below.
Team
The grant team was led by Zuzana Vikarská as the principal investigator; Natálie Dřínosvká, Marek Pivoda, and Filip Vlček also worked on the project from the beginning. After the first year, additional members from the legal profession joined the research team: Ladislav Kováč, who works in the judiciary, and Jan Rohlena, who practices law as an attorney. Furthermore, Michal Kovalčík, Terézia Lazarová, Eliška Dvořáková, Barbora Tomečková, Klára Kamarádová, and Jan Zahradníček also participated in the team’s work as students, and Barbora Budinská cooperated with the team as an international partner.
Deliverables & Dataset
During the course of the grant, the team members published a number of academic outputs (see publications). At the same time, a unique dataset was created containing all preliminary rulings from Czech and Slovak courts, covering all three phases: the order referring the question for a preliminary ruling (phase A), the decision of the Court of Justice (phase B, freely available on the CJEU website) and the subsequent decision of the national court (phase C).