Every European country holds elections. People vote for parliaments, for presidents, for the people who are supposed to write the laws they live under. But there is a layer sitting above almost all of that, and it doesn't answer to voters at all. It's made up of judges. Appointed, not elected, sitting in courtrooms in Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, London and Rome, and their decisions can override laws passed by parliament, override referendums, and in some cases override a country's own constitution.
Every court on this list operates completely in the open, publishes its rulings publicly, and exists because governments themselves agreed to create it. But the fact that it's legal and transparent doesn't make it any less remarkable. A small number of unelected judges can, and regularly do, force elected governments to reverse decisions that voters actually chose. Legal scholars have a name for this: juristocracy — rule by judges.
Here are the five courts in Europe with the most power to do exactly that.
Luxembourg City — seat of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Photo: Unsplash
This one started small. When it was created in 1952, it was essentially a technical court settling disputes about coal and steel production between six countries. Nobody designed it to become what it is now.
Through a landmark 1964 ruling, Costa v ENEL, the CJEU established that EU law generally takes priority over national law — a principle national courts in Germany and Italy would soon push back against, as you'll see below. Even with those pushbacks, the CJEU's authority today binds all 27 EU member states simultaneously, and its rulings on trade, competition, immigration, and human rights reach into the daily law of every country in the bloc.
No national election can overturn a CJEU ruling. No parliament can vote it away. It sits above the entire system by design.
Strasbourg, France — home to the European Court of Human Rights. Photo: Unsplash
People confuse this with the CJEU constantly, and it's worth being clear: they are completely separate institutions. The ECtHR isn't an EU court at all, it belongs to the Council of Europe, a body of 46 countries that includes non-EU members like the UK, Norway, and Switzerland.
What makes this court so powerful is who gets to use it. You don't need to be a government to bring a case here. An individual citizen can sue their own country directly, and if they win, their government is legally bound to change the law. That's a level of direct citizen power over the state that most domestic legal systems don't offer at all.
Germany — home to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, the one national court that made a European institution blink. Photo: Unsplash
This is the one national court on this list that has actually forced a European court to change course, rather than the other way around.
In its 1974 Solange I decision, Germany's Constitutional Court ruled that it did not consider EU-level protection of fundamental rights sufficient, and reserved the right to review EU law against Germany's own constitution. The CJEU responded by developing its own body of case law on fundamental rights, and in 1986, satisfied with that development, Germany's court issued Solange II, standing down from routine review as long as the CJEU kept that protection in place. That back-and-forth — "solange" is German for "as long as" — is still cited today as one of the foundational episodes in EU legal history: a case of national law bending an international court to its will, not the reverse.
London — the UK Supreme Court operates with fully sovereign authority, unchecked by Brussels or Strasbourg since Brexit. Photo: Unsplash
The final court of appeal for the United Kingdom, and the one court on this list operating with fully sovereign authority. Nothing shared with Brussels, nothing shared with Strasbourg, especially since Brexit removed the CJEU's jurisdiction over UK law entirely.
Its power is domestic but real. In 2017, it ruled that the government could not trigger Article 50 to begin Brexit without Parliament's consent. In 2019, it went further, ruling unanimously that the government's decision to suspend Parliament ahead of the Brexit deadline was unlawful. Its authority doesn't reach beyond UK borders the way the CJEU's does, which is exactly why it sits lower on this list. Genuinely powerful, but contained to one country rather than dozens.
Rome — the Italian Constitutional Court developed the doctrine of controlimiti independently of Germany's Solange, arriving at the same conclusion from a different direction. Photo: Unsplash
Italy developed its own version of the same idea, independently of Germany. Its doctrine is called controlimiti — "counter-limits" — and it works on the same logic as Germany's Solange: Italian law would only accept EU supremacy so long as EU law didn't violate Italy's own fundamental constitutional principles.
Solange and controlimiti are parallel doctrines, not the same one, each developed by its own court, in its own language, without direct coordination. But together, pressure from Rome and Karlsruhe arriving from two directions at once is a real part of why fundamental rights protection became embedded into EU law at all.
What This Actually Means
None of these courts seized their power through force. Every one of them was either created by treaty or grew its authority through legal reasoning that governments themselves chose to accept. That's the uncomfortable part. This isn't a hidden system working against democracy, it's a system democracies built on purpose, then quietly lost the ability to fully control.
Whether that's a safeguard or a democratic blind spot depends on who you ask. What isn't in dispute is that a handful of unelected judges, across a handful of courtrooms, can and do overrule the will of voters across an entire continent. Legally, routinely, and almost always without most people noticing it happened.
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Sources and credits
This article was researched and written by the NLM editorial team. Sources: European Parliament Fact Sheets, European e-Justice Portal, Court of Justice of the European Union official history archive, academic legal analysis published in Springer, De Gruyter Brill, and the European Constitutional Law Review.