Need a new search?
If you didn't find what you were looking for, try a new search!
Voting for Illiberalism
On 8 February 2026, Portuguese voters will decide a presidential runoff between António José Seguro, backed by the Socialist Party, and André Ventura, leader of the far-right Chega. The argument I advance here, however, is analytical rather than electoral: that this election crystallizes a confrontation between two models of democracy – one liberal, rooted in the constitutional settlement that emerged from the 1974 revolution, and one illiberal, that treats constitutional constraints as obstacles to the expression of popular will rather than as safeguards of it.
Continue reading >>
The Perpetual Interim
Bulgaria’s chief prosecutor has been exercising power without a valid mandate since 2023, even after the Supreme Court explicitly declared his authority expired. What looks like a technical impasse reveals a subtler form of constitutional erosion: power entrenching itself through interim arrangements, procedural improvisation, and cultivated legal uncertainty. The Bulgarian case shows how institutional capture can advance quietly, without open defiance, constitutional rupture, or triggering the EU’s usual rule-of-law alarms.
Continue reading >>
Immunising the Venice Commission Against Autocratic Contamination
The Venice Commission plays an important role in shaping standards of European constitutionalism. With greater influence, however, should come greater responsibility. As this post will outline, the Venice Commission suffers from one institutional flaw which concerns the method of selecting its members, a flaw which has been made worse by an unwillingness to enforce its own membership requirements and principles of conduct.
Continue reading >>The Rule‑of‑Law Reports Embedded in Political Conditions
While the EU is navigating both external geopolitical instability and internal challenges to constitutional norms, these pressures have made the annual Rule of Law Reports more politically consequential than ever. Yet the persistence of the rule of law crisis reveals a deeper political reality: the effectiveness of the Reports depends less on their design than on the domestic political conditions in which they land. Where illiberal incumbents remain entrenched, they are easily deflected, reframed as external interference, or simply ignored.
Continue reading >>
How Ukraine Should Join the European Union
The European Union is ill prepared for the new world of geopolitical competition. It faces grave external threats, some from unexpected quarters, and struggles to be united in its response. Eurosceptic and nationalist forces continue to obstruct the EU's internal reform. But there are external challenges, principally Ukraine, that will not disappear by the charm of inaction. If a sovereign Ukraine is to be salvaged, it must be admitted to EU membership, and quickly.
Continue reading >>International Law in, and as, Crisis
International law emerges most visibly in moments of catastrophe – war, mass violence, humanitarian breakdown – when it is called upon to restrain power, assign responsibility, and promise a horizon of order. Crisis has never been external to international law; it has been its condition of existence. Yet today, something more troubling is underway. International law is not only responding to crisis; it is itself in crisis. But its crisis did not begin in Gaza, Ukraine, or Washington. Its roots run far deeper. What is needed now is an international law from below.
Continue reading >>
Capital Punishment Revivalism
Israel has long been considered abolitionist, having executed only one individual in its history. While past attempts to reinstate the death penalty have proven unsuccessful, the horrendous scale of the October 7 attack and the ensuing traumatic war have been used to generate political momentum. A new bill, which passed its first reading in the Knesset in November 2025, would impose the death penalty for terrorism-related offenses. The bill should be understood as part of a broader capital punishment revivalism trend in populist regimes, with Israel potentially setting a dangerous precedent for attempts to reinstate the death penalty in Europe and beyond.
Continue reading >>
Between Scylla and Charybdis
Can a national constitution guaranteeing public higher education allow private foreign universities? The Greek Council of State said yes, opening the way for the coexistence between public and private educational institutions. Even though the Council inappropriately resorted to an EU-conforming interpretation against the Constitution's wording and refused to request a preliminary ruling from the EU Court of Justice, its judgment is a prime example of “multilevel constitutionalism”.
Continue reading >>
Ziobro’s Asylum in Hungary
In early January 2026, media reports indicated that Hungary had granted political asylum to Zbigniew Ziobro, Poland’s former Minister of Justice and Prosecutor General and a leading figure of the Law and Justice (PiS) government, who is currently facing criminal investigations in Poland. The granting of political asylum by one EU Member State to a citizen of another Member State is not merely unusual; it is structurally exceptional under EU law.
Continue reading >>
“NATO Would Be Dead”
“Anything less” than U.S. control of Greenland is “unacceptable.” With those words this week, President Donald Trump reignited fears that a U.S. annexation of Greenland could move from rhetoric to reality. As European governments move to reassure Denmark of their support and solidarity, one thing is already clear: if the Greenland annexation scenario were to materialize, nothing would be the same again. We spoke with Marko Milanović about how international law would respond to such a scenario – and what a Greenland annexation would mean for the future of NATO.
Continue reading >>
Two Non-Constitutional Non-Democracies
Later this year, parliamentary elections will be held in Hungary and Israel, two autocratizing countries, whose incumbents are close allies of Donald Trump. The prospects for democratic and constitutional recovery in both Hungary and Israel depend not only on domestic political conditions but also on an increasingly permissive global environment in which systems of governance that fail to meet the requirements of either constitutionalism or democracy reinforce and normalize autocratization.
Continue reading >>Kangaroo Courts and EU Law
In Commission v. Poland, the Court of Justice ruled that Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal no longer qualifies as an independent and impartial tribunal established by law. The ruling decisively addresses the status of the body currently masquerading as Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, although one may question whether the Court did not commit a category error by taking the outputs of such a body seriously.
Continue reading >>
The EU’s 1787 Moment
Recent actions by the United States vis-à-vis Europe, such as the adoption of the National Security Strategy, suggest that the European Union might need to make some quick, existential decisions in the coming years in order to better protect its interests. Europe can look to U.S. history for an example of how to proceed and generate what we might call “a 1787 moment.”
Continue reading >>From Security to Economics
Last week, by adopting Regulation 2025/2600, the Council effectively froze Russian state assets permanently. They had already been frozen under the EU sanctions regime which required unanimous renewal every six months. In our view, this permanent freezing under Article 122(1) TFEU remains primarily designed to address matters of foreign policy and violates the conferral of competence. In the long term, given that the frozen assets also serve as a security for the newly agreed loan of EUR 90 billion for Ukraine, this will also jeopardize the enforceability of the said collateral.
Continue reading >>Winning by Losing
Up to now, religious communities in Germany could require religious affiliation for almost all kinds of employment. Following the CJEU’s intervention, the FCC in November 2025 changed this decades-long practice and thus accorded greater constitutional weight to equality and non-discrimination vis-à-vis religious self-determination. Yet it did more than that: it also reinforced the protection of religious freedom itself. Finally, the decision affirmed the supremacy of EU law in times of fundamental challenges to the transnational rule of law. Egenberger thus constitutes a substantial, well-justified, fundamental-rights-friendly, and welcome shift.
Continue reading >>
State-Approved Information
As the infrastructures for creating, replicating, and disseminating information have increased significantly since the advent of the World Wide Web, the tools used by nationalist governments to control those infrastructures have expanded and evolved to keep pace with technological change. Nationalist governments seek control of knowledge infrastructures both to promote their supporters and beliefs and to erase positions and people who they fear. The United States (US) provides an especially stark example of how rapidly a nationalist government can gain political control of knowledge infrastructures to advance its preferred beliefs and silence opposing views.
Continue reading >>
The Sanctioning of Law
Imagine a Western head of government sanctioning the attorney general and judges of the supreme court because they have brought criminal proceedings against his party colleagues. He has their assets seized, their bank accounts frozen, and their freedom of movement restricted. Unimaginable? Unfortunately, no. This is precisely what the Trump administration has now done with the leadership of the Office of the Prosecutor and six judges of the International Criminal Court.
Continue reading >>Die Sanktionierung des Rechts
Stellen Sie sich einmal vor, dass ein westlicher Regierungschef den Generalstaatsanwalt und Richter des obersten Gerichts sanktioniert, weil sie Strafverfahren gegen seine Parteifreunde betrieben haben. Er lässt ihr Vermögen beschlagnahmen, Bankkonten einfrieren, die Bewegungsfreiheit einschränken. Unvorstellbar? Leider nein. Denn genau dies hat die Trump-Regierung inzwischen mit der Führungsebene der Anklagebehörde und sechs Richtern des Internationalen Strafgerichtshofs getan.
Continue reading >>
Populism Is Here to Stay
Following the presidential defeat of his preferred candidate in June 2025, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a former president of the European Council, recalibrated – or, more precisely, intensified – his strategy of imitating illiberal political forces, to the extent that his political rhetoric could easily be now mistaken for Orbán’s. What are the implications of this troubling development for what is, in fact, at least in the recent European context, a Polish speciality: the process of democratic restoration?
Continue reading >>Is the European Court of Justice a Protector of the Weak?
Is the European Court of Justice biased toward business interests, or does it protect the weak? Drawing on a novel dataset of nearly 7,000 rulings from 1962 to 2016, this blog post revisits a longstanding debate with systematic evidence. Contrary to persistent critiques, this blog post shows that individuals invoking rights win more often than corporate litigants. Through strategies of “leveling” and “spotlighting,” the ECJ not only counters resource asymmetries in litigation but also publicly amplifies pro-individual rights outcomes.
Continue reading >>“Danger becomes less scary when it is better understood”
Five Questions to Kim L. Scheppele
Continue reading >>
„Gefahr wirkt weniger bedrohlich, wenn man sie versteht“
Fünf Fragen an Kim L. Scheppele
Continue reading >>
The EU’s Chance to Curb Media Capture
On 31 October 2025, the Swiss media group Ringier sold its entire Hungarian media portfolio – including the tabloid Blikk – to Indamedia, an Orbán-government-aligned group that already controls 18 online publications and platforms. For the past fifteen years, the EU seemed largely powerless as the “predator of press freedom”, Viktor Orbán systematically undermined media freedom. Yet the newly adopted European Media Freedom Act could mark a turning point, potentially breaking new constitutional ground for the EU in safeguarding media freedom and pluralism.
Continue reading >>
Human Rights and Digital Border Governance
OHCHR’s forthcoming guidance on human rights-based digital border governance consolidates legal standards for data-intensive migration and border control. This contribution identifies where such guidance can help, and where a significant shift in current State practice is needed: clear legal basis and safeguards for intrusive practices, data sharing and interoperability, oversight of algorithmic systems, human rights impact assessment, and the use of security and emergency regimes that dilute rights protections. Each area is framed by the need to ensure legality, necessity and proportionality, non-discrimination, and effective remedy.
Continue reading >>
Walking a Tightrope
The EU’s proposed Reparations Loan – using immobilised Russian state assets to finance support for Ukraine – sits on precarious legal and political ground. While the Commission argues the scheme is temporary, reversible, and defensible under international and EU law, critics warn that it risks disguised confiscation, countermeasures, investment claims, and long-term damage to Europe’s financial stability. Belgium’s strong objections highlight the deep uncertainties surrounding a mechanism that touches vital national and Union interests ahead of a decisive European Council meeting.
Continue reading >>
Migrants’ Rights Before the European Court of Human Rights
As we are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the topic of migration stands at the center of concerns about the Convention’s state of health. In this blogpost adapted from my remarks at a Conference in the Federal Ministry for Justice and Consumer Protection, I argue that those attacking the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for an over-reaching jurisprudence regarding migrants’ rights misconstrue the actual case law.
Continue reading >>The ECHR’s Contribution to European Society
On the Convention’s 75th anniversary, this essay highlights its contribution to “European society” as stated in Article 2 TEU. It sketches how the Convention, as operationalized by the Strasbourg institutions, has shaped European society’s constitutional core, provided a general structure of rights, supported a culture of justification, and contributed to making European society democratic. Finally, it speculates on how the Convention’s significance might evolve so that it can be celebrated again at its 100th anniversary.
Continue reading >>
Leading Through Dialogue
The ECtHR’s next decades will be shaped by its capacity to lead through dialogue rather than dominance. The goal is not a universal model, but a network of courts engaged in reciprocal learning. The 75th anniversary coincides with unprecedented global challenges – climate change, digital governance, mass displacement – that no regional system can tackle alone. Coordinated jurisprudential development, joint thematic reports, and open-access repositories of case law can enhance coherence without sacrificing diversity.
Continue reading >>
The Trojan Horse of Free Movement Law
On 25 November 2025, the EU Court of Justice confirmed in “Trojan” that Member States are obliged to recognise the marriage between two same-sex EU citizens lawfully concluded in another Member State in the exercise of their freedom of movement, even if their national legislation does not allow such marriage. While this outcome was largely foreseeable, the CJEU’s reliance on Article 21(1) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights on the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation is striking, introducing a new, potentially transformative approach to equality in EU law.
Continue reading >>When Legal Uncertainty Violates Reproductive Rights
In 2020, the Polish Constitutional Court prohibited abortion sought on the grounds of fetal defects. While the ruling was announced, it was not published for three months, creating legal uncertainty which could change at any time. Accordingly, on 13 November 2025, the ECtHR, in A.R. v. Poland, ruled that this instability violates Article 8 of the ECHR. Crucially, the case reveals a deeper dimension of legal uncertainty, as both pro-choice and anti-choice actors were actively involved, seeking to shape the law in opposite directions.
Continue reading >>
Protesting Outside The Homes Of Politicians
On 13 November 2025, Minister of State for the Home Department Lord Hanson introduced an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill providing for the new “offence of making representations to public office-holders in their home”. Recent years have seen many protests outside the private homes of politicians in the UK. However, it is questionable whether the amendment is compatible with Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) on freedom of assembly.
Continue reading >>
Der Plan von der Abschaffung des Asyls
Vom Schutzrecht zur Fiktion
Continue reading >>Not All Mandates Are Equal
The European Parliament, following the recommendations of its Committee on Legal Affairs, voted against waiving the immunity of two of its Members elected in Hungary, Péter Magyar and Klára Dobrev on the requests of the Hungarian authorities in early October 2025. In determining the fate of representatives elected in a Member State that is no longer democratic, the European Parliament reached the right decision, based on the wrong premises. Undemocratically elected MEPs should enjoy immunity only if they belong to the undemocratic regime’s opposition and have no record of dismantling democratic institutions.
Continue reading >>Doxing Judges
More than a decade after the Baka judgment, Hungary’s judges remain exposed. A massive data leak has revealed personal details of nearly 200,000 citizens — including judges — allegedly linked to an opposition app. Pro-government media swiftly published their names, questioning their impartiality and even calling for dismissals. Instead of protecting those targeted, judicial leaders hinted at disciplinary action.
Continue reading >>
Access to Knowledge on the Move(ment)
In her State of the Union speech, Ursula von der Leyen outlined several key priorities, among which one unmistakably stood out as a core objective: strengthening the EU Single Market. And there it was again – resurfacing with growing political weight – the call for a “fifth Freedom”: the free movement of knowledge and innovation. This contribution examines the legal implications that a new Freedom of movement could have on the right to access knowledge in the fields of research and education.
Continue reading >>
Winning by Losing
The FCC has handed down its long-awaited decision in the Egenberger case. The decision seems to be a confirmation of the strong protection of religious communities’ corporate religious freedom and right to self-determination. At the same time, however, the FCC incorporated the standards set out in EU anti-discrimination law and CJEU’ jurisprudence. The decision is thus turning the page on a decades-long legal debate. It meaningfully protects the right to religious self-determination, and at the same time it is sensitive to the freedom of religion of individuals and the prohibition of discrimination.
Continue reading >>
Rainbow Europe or Rainbow Washing?
A growing number of EU Member States have proposed or introduced legislation that directly targets LGBTIQA+ individuals. What a decade ago seemed to be Hungary’s isolated case is today a growing trend across the Union. Against this backdrop, the European Commission just published its new LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy (2026-2030). In my view, however, this initiative represents a downgraded commitment of the European Commission towards the protection of Queer individuals.
Continue reading >>
„Ein Verstoß gegen das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker“
Fünf Fragen an Jochen von Bernstorff
Continue reading >>
“A Violation of the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination”
Five Questions to Jochen von Bernstorff
Continue reading >>
Academic Freedom as a Human Right
New attempts by the U.S. administration to tie federal funding to an ideologically driven “Compact for Academic Excellence” have sent shockwaves through universities, raising alarms about political steering of curricula and governance. These developments are not isolated: they echo tactics increasingly used worldwide, including within the EU, where subtle regulatory and financial pressures are reshaping the academic landscape. To counter this erosion, the EU must treat academic freedom not as a sectoral issue, but as a fundamental right under Article 13 CFR.
Continue reading >>
Speaking Out on Campus
Campus protests have been testing European universities. The demonstrations at Freie Universität Berlin highlighted the tension between seeing universities as open spaces for free speech and regarding them primarily as institutions dedicated to academic discourse. German courts have leaned toward the latter approach, whereas EU law provides a broader scope for academic freedom while still tying it to academic contexts. Although the upcoming European Research Area Act does not appear to address this issue, guidance from EU law could help universities strike a better balance between protecting the right to protest and safeguarding academic freedom.
Continue reading >>
Accent on the Language of Instruction
Language of instruction in European higher education is increasingly contested. Once tied mainly to minority language protection, language policies now shape debates on internationalisation and the spread of English-language teaching. Yet their implications for academic freedom as a legal right remain understudied. This post aims to explore what interpretative guidance on language of instruction can be drawn from other legal systems and how it could inform future interpretations of Article 13 CFR’s linguistic dimension.
Continue reading >>
Castles of Illiberal Thought
On the hills of Buda, a vast new campus for Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) – an Orbán-linked “think tank” and training ground for illiberal elites – is taking shape. Though still little known internationally, MCC has grown into a sprawling network with over 35 locations across Hungary, the wider Carpathian Basin, and even Brussels. Its recent “report” attacking the EU’s Jean Monnet programme and individual academics as “propagandists” signals how it seeks to shape narratives about Europe and academia. Positioned at the intersection of authoritarian legitimation and elite co-optation, MCC is not just a Hungarian phenomenon – it is a challenge to academic freedom with broader European implications.
Continue reading >>
Codifying Belonging
Amid numerous global catastrophes, a quieter crisis at home is strikingly overlooked: a direct attack on equality and, effectively, the denial of Roma people’s rights, their freedom of movement, and dignity as European citizens. The newly adopted Hungary’s 2025 Act on the Protection of Local Identity straightforwardly normalises racial exclusion at the local level under the guise of safeguarding “heritage” and “community values,” and directly empowers local governments to determine who may belong within their borders.
Continue reading >>
As Open as Necessary?
Vetting researchers, screening funding, and restricting dual-use fields show how science has moved to the heart of national security concerns. Within the EU, “research security” has become central to the strategic autonomy agenda, aiming to protect research from espionage, IP theft, and undue foreign influence. Yet securitising science also risks expanding political control and subordinating research to security and market logics. As such, Article 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights must be interpreted to protect academic freedom not only from direct state interference, but also from this subtler colonisation by political and economic systems.
Continue reading >>