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Legal remedies applied in the proceedings before the Court of Justice of the European Union have some distinctive features as compared to the legal remedies used in the national judicial systems. At first, the communitarian justice system originally did not envisage the possibility of filing an appeal with this Court as a regular legal remedy but there were other remedies that could be pursued in respect of the judgments issued by the Court. After the establishment of the Court of First Instance, the Procedural Law of the European Union introduced the possibility of filing an appeal with the Court of Justice against the judgments of the Court of First Instance. Later, the Court of First Instance became competent to decide on appeals against the judgments rendered by the judical panels, which were established in the meantime. The Court of First Instance and judical panels reserved the possibility of using other legal remedies against the final decisions rendered by these judicial authorities. In this respect, the Lisbon Treaty did not bring any significant changes, except that the Court of First Instance was renamed into the General Court whereas the judicial panels were designated as specialized courts. Taking into account the system of legal remedies recognized by the Procedural Law of the European Union, the first part of the paper deals with appeals as a regular legal instrument for bringing the case before a higher instance court which is to review the judgment of a lower instance court, including appeals against the decisions of the General Court and specialized courts. In the second part of the paper, the authors focus on the legal remedies which are awarded by the same court that issued the judgment. This category includes the application of a third party and revision, which may be considered as extraordinary legal remedies, as well as the objection against the judgment by default, judgment interpretation, judgment rectification and supplementing the judgment, which are considered to be extraordinary procedural remedies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, the Court of Justice of the European Union has been overloaded with requests for preliminary rulings, given that these proceedings make up more than three-quarters of the Court caseload. Such circumstances constitute a significant constraint to the operation of the Court, which is unable to quickly and effectively respond to the preliminary questions which are referred to this Court by the national courts of Member States. In addition, the duration of the regular preliminary ruling proceedings jeopardizes the European standards not only in terms of the lengthy procedure but also in terms of observing the right of each individual to effective judicial protection within a reasonable time. In order to make the proceedings faster and more effective, the procedural rules have been repeatedly amended and supplemented. The applicable Rules of Procedure of the Court stipulate some exceptions from the regular preliminary ruling procedure. The first one is the so-called simplified procedure, where the Court renders a final decision in the form of a reasoned order, without scheduling an oral hearing and obtaining the written opinion of the Advocate-General. The Court may also decide to institute the expedited procedure, by means of which the case at issue is given absolute priority over other cases. The last exception is the urgent procedure, which is applicable only in the area of freedom, security and justice; it implies the omission of certain stages of the regular preliminary ruling procedure. The analyses presented in this paper show that the results achieved in terms of reducing the length of the regular preliminary ruling procedure are generally positive. Thus, the average time required for rendering a decision in the expedited procedure is approximately four and a half months, which is certainly a significant improvement as compared to the length of the regular procedure which takes sixteen to seventeen months. The initial results accomplished by instituting the urgent procedure are even more encouraging, as the average duration of this procedure is approximately two months. The time required for deliberation in an urgent procedure has never exceeded three months, which makes this procedure faster and more efficient than the expedited procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]