https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2013/11/13/the-stolen-refere...
It was one of the events that led to the ECJ's perception as an activist court that makes EU law unknowable, because what is or is not illegal can't be understood by reading the treaties or laws. Here's an example of some British lawyers expressing that view:
https://lawyersforbritain.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/eu-...
The effects of the Charter, whether applied to UK laws made before or after Brexit, cannot be predicted as its operation would be dependent on the rapidly evolving and expansionist case law of the European Court of Justice, and would open the door to judicial adventurism in our own courts.
Not just the UK has complained about this. Here's an example of corruption in the ECJ uncovered by Irish journalists, in which the ECJ was trying to surreptitiously expand EU powers:
https://euobserver.com/investigations/131569
It is clearly corrupt to hear a bogus case like that where the plaintiff doesn't even know they're in a court case at all and both sides are represented by the same firm, yet nothing was ever done about it.
There are counter-arguments but I see no need to thrash them out. It's nice just to see some fucking thought.
If that were the only reason (nobody said it was) then the UK had to leave the UK immediately.
I mean, what you're complaining about here is how ~all vaguely modern legal systems work, not anything special about the EU.
It's neither bad nor vaguely written.
It's not courts who "discover" something, it's the predatory industry that keeps discovering that yes, laws matter, and yes, privacy matters.
The EU has had problems with this kind of activist lawmaking for a long time. It's one of the factors behind Brexit. Some Leave campaigners argued that it was impossible to make any kind of deal or compromise with the EU if it meant staying in, because no matter how clearly written it appeared to be and no matter how watertight the international treaty encoding it was, the European courts would simply ignore it and/or rule it invalid. This criticism landed because there was precedent for that, where the courts had previously done exactly the same thing with other agreements. The same debate is now playing out around the ECHR as well, which the UK stayed in because it's not technically an EU court, just a European court. Same cultural issues though.