Advisory opinion cases at the EFTA Court – getting there faster?

The EFTA Court abolished reports for the hearing in 2025 to speed up advisory opinions. Has the change delivered?

Author: Kyrre Isaksen, EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA)

Introduction

As of 2025, the EFTA Court is no longer preparing reports for the hearing in advisory opinion cases. The purpose of this change is to reduce the time it takes from the Court's receipt of a request for an advisory opinion until judgment is delivered.

As pointed out by Ingrid Barlund, Christian Franklin and Halvard Haukeland Fredriksen in Transparency and efficiency in Advisory Opinion Cases before the EFTA Court (2024), published on EFTA-Studies.org, the abolition of the report for the hearing could have an impact on the transparency of the advisory opinion procedure.

The present text will not further analyse this important aspect of the changes to the procedures, but will mainly focus on one simple question: Has the effort to reduce the processing time been successful?

Recent changes to the procedures

The majority of cases before the EFTA Court are requests for advisory opinions. This mirrors the situation before the Court of Justice of the European Union, where requests for preliminary rulings likewise constitute the largest category of cases.

In recent years the EFTA Court has received an increased number of requests for advisory opinions. In 2023, 2024 and 2025 the Court received 12 or 13 requests every year. In the 10-year period before that, the number of requests varied a lot, from two cases in 2018 to 14 in 2020. Looking at the period prior to 2015, the Court on average received less than five cases per year, and in some years only one case.

Possibly against that background, the Court proposed in a public consultation of 14 March 2024 to no longer prepare a report for the hearing in advisory opinion cases. In the consultation, the Court pointed out that drafting, revision and translation of the report for the hearing generally accounts for around 4–6 weeks in the handling of a request for an advisory opinion. According to the consultation, the Court currently endeavours to complete these cases in 8 to 11 months. The proposal required amendments to the Court’s Statute and Rules of Procedure, which were decided by the EEA/EFTA States on 6 December 2024.

As of 2025, the report for the hearing has been replaced with an information note, which contains brief information about the case, the referred questions and the submitted suggested answers to the questions. The information note is published on the Court's website around 1–2 weeks before the hearing.

In the past few years, the Court has also made other adjustments to how it deals with advisory opinion cases, especially with regard to increased transparency. As of 2021, the Court has published the requests for advisory opinions from national courts on its website, both in the original language and in English translation.

From the same point in time, the Court has also published the written observations submitted by the parties and other participants, such as ESA, the European Commission and States. Initially, the Court published the written observations after the judgment, but as of Case E-6/25 Saga Subsea, the Court started to publish the written observations around 1–2 weeks ahead of the hearing. It could be argued that the publication of the written observations ahead of the hearing compensates for the discontinuation of the report for the hearing.

In addition, there have been several cases in recent years where courts in Norway have sent the request for an advisory opinion to the Court in English. This can also contribute to a shorter processing time, as it means that the request does not have to be translated from Norwegian to English. Interestingly, up to now there are no examples where courts in Iceland or Liechtenstein have sent requests for advisory opinions in English.

Reduced processing time?

Coming back to the question raised in the introduction: Has abolishing the report for the hearing had any effect on the processing time?

It is too early to say for sure. The last advisory opinion case where the Court prepared a report for the hearing was Case E-18/24 Greenpeace, where the hearing took place on 19 December 2024. Since then, the Court has delivered judgments in ten advisory opinion cases without a report for the hearing.

That said, when looking at these ten cases, the changes to the procedures appear to have had the desired effect. The average time between the Court's receipt of a request and the delivery of judgment in these cases has been around eight months. It should be noted that in two of the ten cases, the Court dispensed with the hearing, which generally leads to a shorter processing time.

In only one of the ten cases, the processing time exceeded ten months: In Case E-6/25 Saga Subsea. This case, however, concerning the geographical scope of the EEA Agreement, has been described as one of the most important judgments by the Court in recent years.

In the years 2023 and 2022, the average processing time was around 11 months. The same was the case in 2021, 2020 and 2019. In earlier years, the processing time tended to be shorter. But as pointed out above, the Court also had fewer cases.

Any comparison between the EFTA Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union in this regard is difficult, given the substantial differences in their respective size and caseload, as well as the obligation to refer cases in the EU. Even so, the difference in processing times is noteworthy. According to the website of the Court of Justice, the average length of preliminary ruling proceedings was 17.2 months in 2024 and 16.9 months in 2025, considerably longer than the EFTA Court's recent average in advisory opinion cases.

It will be interesting to see whether the trend towards shorter processing times in advisory opinion cases is confirmed over the longer term. Referred cases are, of course, highly diverse, and more complex cases will necessarily take longer than straightforward ones. Processing time matters, and national courts will surely appreciate receiving a reply more quickly. Reducing the processing time could even make it more attractive for national courts in Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway to refer cases to the EFTA Court.

But in the end, it is of course the quality and clarity of the judgments that matter most.

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About the author

Kyrre Isaksen currently works as Legal Adviser in the Legal Affairs Department of the EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA). He has been an agent for ESA in many cases before the EFTA Court. From 1 August 2026 he will take up a new position as Deputy Director of ESA’s Internal Market Affairs Directorate. All opinions and views are those of the author and are not intended to represent the official position of ESA. 

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How to cite

Isaksen, Kyrre (2026): Advisory opinion cases at the EFTA Court – getting there faster? Blog. EFTA-Studies.org.