Overview of recent cases before the Court of Justice of the European Union (January–June 2023)

Abstract

In this casenote, the judgments in DRV Intertrans and Verbraeken (Joined Cases C-410/21 and C-661/21) and Thermalhotel Fontana (Case C-411/22) are discussed. DRV Intertrans and Verbraeken concerned a case of alleged fraudulent A1 certificates for posted workers. The issue was that those A1 certificates were only provisionally, as opposed to definitively, withdrawn by the issuing institution. As a result, the referring court in DRV Intertrans and Verbraken asked the Court of Justice whether the courts of the Member State where the work was carried out could consider the provisional withdrawal of the A1 certificates by the issuing institution as rendering those A1 certificate non-binding. Alternatively, the referring court asked whether it could disregard those A1 certificates following the Altun jurisprudence of the Court of Justice. Thermalhotel Fontana involved isolation measures being imposed on frontier workers by their Member State of residence, making them unable to work. The specific legal issue at hand in Thermalhotel Fontana concerned the fact that the employer of those frontier workers was not able to get compensation from Austria, the Member State of establishment, for his employees due to the fact that the isolation measures were not taken by Austria but by the Member States of residence of the frontier workers. Considering that this case did not fall within the scope of Regulation 883/2004, the Court examined it under the principle of equal treatment of EU workers.