Murray Ritchie considers the uneasy relationship between the Government and the European Court of Justice.

FOR a party pledged to upholding law and order, the British Conservative Government has a strange approach to the European Court of Justice. Mr Major appears to see nothing perverse in pleading before a court which many in his party regard as bullying and intrusive and ripe for abolition.

After the latest spat in the beef row yesterday and the flat rejection of Britain's appeal to have the global export ban lifted, we can now expect the most vociferous law-and-order Tories, who are also often the most Euro-sceptic, to campaign for open defiance of the court.

There are precedents for this sort of behaviour. In a recent judgment involving the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights - nothing to do with the European Union, but another ``foreign'' jurisdiction of the type resisted by the Government - and an IRA sympathiser, the deputy Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine, promised Britain ``will simply ignore it''.

In fact, the Government did no such thing and eventually paid up the other side's costs while doing little to admit it.

In a similar case involving the human rights court this week, an English pensioner unexpectedly lost a case in which he claimed he was being discriminated against by having to wait until he was 65 for a bus pass while women got it at 60. The case was recorded without much fuss in the domestic media. If it had gone the other way, of course, Sir Teddy and Teresa and Bill would have been choking on their soundbites in protest.

The Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice (ECJ) presents a similar but trickier problem. It exists for the sole purpose of interpreting and applying European Union law as laid down in the EU's treaties and in regulations and directives decided by member states in Brussels. It can also be asked to rule on cases referred by national courts.

For this reason it is often seen from outside - and particularly by lawyers - as boring and preoccupied with esoteric questions about farming and trade. But there are times when its judgments affect the life of every single European, as the decision from Luxembourg did yesterday in denying them the right - should they wish it, which they don't - to eat British beef.

Anyone scanning routine coverage of the ECJ in the London newspapers could be forgiven for concluding that it is some sort of foreign enemy of Britain. Whenever a case goes against the UK, there is an outcry in England, invariably fuelled by the Eurosceptics and increasingly by the Government itself. When the court finds in our favour, there is often just silence.

Yet Britain's dealings with the court are usually less fractious than those of other member states. Recent figures showed that cases brought against Britain were far fewer than against some other member states. Britain has been pursued more than 30 times in the court, a statistic which pales beside the Italian record (250 and rising), the Belgian (130), or the French (116). It is also less than half of the German record, although it should be remembered those countries were all in the European Community (as was) before the United Kingdom.

Though the fact might have gone generally unnoticed in the past, the ECJ has found in favour of Britain in some difficult cases, notably when it slapped down the Germans for the actions of their regional parliaments in continuing to forbid the import of British beef (that was before the current export ban).

Despite Eurosceptic claims that the court is political, its 15 judges are appointed by the member states on the basis of their impartiality and qualifications. Their sum does not amount to a US-style Supreme Court because the US system puts Supreme Court judges at the top of a graduated legal system in a federal state. The ECJ rules only on European law and has little else to do with the various legal systems in the 15 EU member states.

But it is the perceived ``federalist'' persona of the ECJ which terrifies the Tories and other British Eurosceptics. For this reason, the British Government wants the ECJ's wings clipped so that its aspirations and those of its supporters elsewhere in the European Union are blocked.

Some hope. The EU has already spent months discussing how the court should operate in future as part of the agenda for the ongoing Maastricht review. A clearer idea of how isolated the British are on this issue will come in Dublin, in October, when the Irish host a special summit to review progress.

In the meantime, we know that the rest of the EU, by and large, wants the court's role strengthened, while the British want it limited or even weakened. Most other states want the ECJ to step up its role in the fields of justice and home affairs as a means of further protecting individual rights. Some states want it given more power to enforce its decisions more rapidly.

Britain's present political leadership sees this sort of talk as just another federalist threat to UK sovereignty. It must follow, therefore, that yet another dispute is in prospect between the Tories and the EU when the time comes to sign up for Maastricht 2.