La pregiudiziale di validità europea alias del sindacato di costituzionalità?

The article aims to assess whether the preliminary reference on validity is increasingly assuming the characteristics of a constitutional review of legitimacy, according to a centralized and specialized control model. To this end, the article analyzes the developments in European case-law regarding the configuration of a diffuse review entrusted to national courts for ensuring compliance with hierarchically superior EU norms, while the jurisdiction to declare invalid EU acts remains centralized in the Court of Justice. The study then explores how this centralized jurisdiction is still conceived as subsidiary and complementary to the action for annulment, which remains the favorite mechanism for reviewing the legality of EU acts. It further examines Court of Justice’s case-law that attributes significant ultra partes effects to declarations of invalidity – an approach that brings such decisions closer to the typical effects of annulment judgments – while also highlighting how a declaration of invalidity does not necessarily imply the breach of a fundamental norm, and how the Court’s decisional formulas still appears, in certain respects, underdeveloped. Finally, the article investigates how the increasing focus of validity questions on compliance with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is reshaping the nature of the preliminary reference on validity. This evolution is endowing the procedure with a more constitutional dimension and gradually positioning it as a key mechanism in reconciling the various levels of rights protection.