Conflicts of international and national customs law with EU customs law: the example of the Republic of Lithuania

Abstract

The article examines the functioning of the modern customs regulatory environment for the EU Member States, which is composed of three levels of sources: international legal instruments, EU primary and secondary legislation and national legislation of individual Member States. However, the practical application of these LEX PORTUS # 2 (22)'2020provisions is related to conflicts between the sources of national and international law and even the different sources of international law itself. It should be noted that at the present time, individual states have not yet formed a unified approach on whether the WTO Agreements should have a direct effect in their national legal system, as most of the states are following the doctrine of dualism and deny this possibility, although the practices followed by the national courts of the Republic of Lithuania have shown the elements of a monistic approach to this problem. The increasing use of international preferential trade agreements and the prevalence of agreements, which establish the customs unions, could also be regarded as a challenge to the development of international economic law and international trade system. Moreover, analysis of the judicial practices of national courts (in the Republic of Lithuania) and the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union has confirmed that an explicit approach to the relationship existing between international, EU and national customs law has not yet materialized.

Sui Generis of European Union Customs Law

“…First, a doctrinal discussion of the theoretical and applied aspects of EU customs law functioning within its customs territory is crucial for ensuring the effective functioning of the EU in general. Therefore, scientists from the EU Founding states (Lux, 2007;Rogmann, 2019;Wit, 2019) as well as the scientists from the states that later became the EU members (Valantiejus & Katuoka, 2019;Erkoreka, 2020;Valantiejus, 2020) dedicate scientific papers to this issue. Secondly, the scope of the legal impact of EU customs law is much larger than the scope of its functioning, limited by the EU customs territory.…”

“…In view of this, various aspects of EU customs law have repeatedly been the subject of research by scientists from around the world. For example, among the most popular of them are: the influence of international law on the EU customs law formation and their interaction (Lux, 2007;Rogmann, 2019;Ovádek & Willemyns, 2019); problematic aspects of the uniform application of EU customs law by its member states (Valantiejus & Katuoka, 2019;Shtal et al, 2018); the role of EU customs law in the europeanisation of national administrative law and the formation of EU administrative law (Limbach, 2015); and issues of interaction of EU customs law with the national customs law of its member states (Valantiejus, 2020).…”