The EU member states have been using the action for annulment to challenge the legality
of EU measures while pursuing a range of non-legal and essentially political motivations.
This also holds for the V4 member states, which have also resorted to annulment actions
to judicialize their legislative conflicts within the EU before the CJEU. Among the
V4, Poland has been the most frequent litigant, using this institutional tool increasingly
actively during the last 10 years. Poland’s behavior appears to confirm expectations
of differentiation among this group of member states. It also coincides with a period
of political change marked by deep legislative conflicts within the EU. The V4 annulment
challenges against EU legislative measures usually made a genuine effort to achieve
the legal objective of annulling the challenged legal act. However, there is evidence
that they also pursued certain political motivations or a combination of them. These
could include the securing of gains in domestic politics, avoiding the local costs
of an EU policy misfit and/or promoting a preferred policy position, and/or influencing
EU competence arrangements. In a few cases, the litigant member state aimed to avoid
concrete material disadvantages. Securing a legal interpretation from the CJEU that
would influence the behavior of other EU actors or clarify the law affecting the position
of the applicant member state also motivated some of the V4 legal challenges.
