As is widely known, economic operators in the internal market are at liberty to make use of their rights under EU law and move freely throughout the Union. However, not all thrive towards the same end; some merely abuse the rights conferred upon them by Union law solely for their own benefit, to the detriment of their home Member States. This makes identifying the line between use and abuse of rights in EU law an often difficult task.

The system of value-added tax in the EU is one which is vulnerable to abuse. Though the area has reached a high level of harmonisation, the EU is still presented with the challenge of constructing a single market consisting of 28 different value-added tax (VAT) systems, which withstands various attempts to obtain benefits for which it was not designed.

The Court has often used the aforementioned principle of abuse of EU law as a tool with which to combat fraud in the form of denying rights relied on from the VAT Directive, where such rights are derived in cases of established tax fraud or where there has been a failure to comply with the conditions of good faith.

Of particular interest to this paper is the extent to which a general principle may emerge, and whether the principle of prohibition of abuse of EU law may be regarded as a constitutional general principle of EU law. This will be done by examining the relevant case law of the Court and the recent trends, which, in the opinion of the author, confirm the notion that there is one general principle of abuse of EU law.

Part I: The Notion of Abuse in EU law
Early linguistic discrepancies notwithstanding, the author contends that there is indeed only one concept of abuse. This will be highlighted by the willingness of the Court to s