cases the Court did not refrain from making a fundamental rights review of anti-terrorist decisions of the Council.L Kadi was tantamount to the idea that the EU is a union based on the rule of law in which all acts of its institutions are submitted to review of their compatibility with, in particular, the Treaties, general principles of law and fundamental rights.LI When asked to rule on measures adopted in a situation of financial and economic emergency, the Court could not have stayed dormant when questioned with possible breaches of fundamental rights based on legislation clearly stemming from EU law sources. It had also the constitutional obligation to check the respect by EU institutions of core values of the rule of law during their involvement in the bailout of Member States. The Court of Justice intervention was all the more necessary because national courts were prohibited from reviewing the validity of MoUs. Assuming the role of a constitutional court within a concentrated system of constitutional judicial review, the Court of Justice pre-empted all competence to declare that an EU act is invalid; the exclusivity of that jurisdiction having the purpose of guaranteeing legal certainty by ensuring that EU law is applied uniformly.LII National courts may consider the validity of an EU law act, but they are not endowed with the power to declare such an act invalid themselves.LIII This judicial stance is a paragon of judicial activism (Vilhena de Freitas 2015: 176), as the wording of article 267 (3) TFUE seems to allow national lower courts themselves to trump the application of invalid EU law. 5. Portuguese courts and the MoU 5.1. One of the essential features of the jurisdictional system of EU is that it is organized according to the principle of subsidiarity (Piçarra and Pereira Coutinho 2012: 74). The Treaty of Rome rejected the creation of a federal system of courts and instead gave the responsibility to apply EU law in the Member States to national courts, which thereby became ‘ordinary courts of EU law.’LIV The inertia of the Court of Justice during the bailout may be partially linked to the behaviour of Portuguese courts. The latter either failed to properly identify the EU legal instruments that were responsible for the national austerity measures, or simply disregarded their role as common EU law courts of ordinary jurisdiction when they did not refer a Except where otherwise noted content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons 2.5 Italy License E -120