The Interaction Between Administrative and Judicial Review at the European Level: Notes on the Judgment of the General Court of 6 October 2021 in Joined Cases T-351/18 and T-584/18, Ukrselhosprom PCF LLC and Versobank AS v ECB

In many fields of EU administration, it has become common for secondary law to establish a pre-judicial appeal procedure that allows applicants to contest decisions administratively before initiating court litigation. Unlike many national systems, however, Union law does not contain a general and positively defined concept of administrative review. This forces secondary law legislators to construct such an edifice through the available administrative law toolkit, most importantly, the decision under Article 288 TFEU as the main instrument. In a recent case that arose in the context of the ECB’s banking supervision activities in the Single Supervisory Mechanism, this has caused problems for the General Court to arrive at a pragmatically reasonable outcome in a doctrinally sound manner. The present case note discusses this judgment in the context of prior precedents from which it partially deviates. It also undertakes some conjecture as to the possible consequences of the ruling for the future and administrative appeal procedures beyond the Banking Union.