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King's College London

Posts by authors affiliated with King's College London

28 October 2024
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The Missing Chapter

The European Commission’s Annual Rule of Law Report aims to prevent further rule of law backsliding within the EU by examining the rule of law situation in Member States. However, the report is missing an important chapter: the EU itself. On 28 October 2024, the Rule of Law Clinic (CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest), together with experts from across Europe, began bridging this gap by publishing the first report on EU adherence to rule of law standards. Without a meaningful self-assessment of its own compliance with rule of law principles, the EU weakens its credibility, particularly when addressing systemic non-compliance with EU law by Member States.

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07 April 2024

Reimagining Indian Federalism

As India’s new dominant party system coalesced after 2014, the country entered a phase of centralisation. India has always had federalism with a strong centre, but from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s, political and economic regionalism and national coalition governments encompassing national and regional parties produced an appearance of deepening federalisation. Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became the first party in over 25 years to win an outright parliamentary majority, the twin pillars of political centralisation under a dominant party system and economic concentration, have once again drawn attention to the contested nature of India’s federal contract.

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05 April 2024

Access and Benefit-Sharing Isn’t Equity

It is unsurprising that equity has featured so prominently in the Pandemic Treaty negotiations – the Treaty is a direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was characterised by gross inequality between high-income and LMICs. For all the talk at the start of the Treaty negotiation process of equity, of doing things differently in the future, it appears that very little will change. If it works, and there are very good reasons to believe that it will not work, it will at best make sure that a small proportion of vaccines end up where they need to be, and the rest will continue to go to the highest bidder, regardless of need, equity, or justice.

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17 November 2023
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Defeat in the Supreme Court

On 15 November 2023, the UK Supreme Court (UKSC) unanimously declared the government’s policy of removing some asylum seekers to Rwanda to process their claims  unlawful. Like the Court of Appeal, it found substantial grounds for believing that asylum seekers would face a real risk of ill-treatment because of insufficient guarantees against refoulement. This post explores the origin and significance of the UKSC judgment and the legal and policy implications of the UK government’s immediate response to it. 

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20 March 2023
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50 Years On

In 1973 and on the third attempt, Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK) with Denmark acceded to the European Communities, while Norway opted not to join following a referendum. For Ireland and the UK, the half-century since has brought about remarkable social, economic, demographic, political, and legal changes in both states leading to the UK leaving the EU in 2020 and Ireland remaining a Member State. Given the shared anniversary and divergent responses to EU membership in the context of strong (if complex) ties between the two states and a shared common law tradition, a reflection on the 50th anniversary of their accession to what is now the European Union (EU) is timely.

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18 August 2022

Future-Proofing Global Health Governance Through the Proposed Pandemic Treaty

It is clear that humanity is not prepared for the next pandemic; the global health governance architecture requires fundamental change in order to get us to that point. If humanity is to be prepared for the next pandemic, we must fix the deep rooted, structural inequalities which are embedded within our global health system. The pandemic treaty is an opportunity to do this, but on the basis of the present proposals, and the manner in which the treaty is being developed, it is clear that the treaty will fall far short of such expectations.

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26 July 2022

Beyond Constitutional Doctrine?

In a recent post on Verfassungsblog, Michał Stambulski and Karol Muszyński make a number of wide-ranging statements and stinging criticisms of what they believe to be the shortcomings of “doctrinal constitutionalism”, “legal constitutionalism” and “doctrinal legal constitutionalism.” What the authors fail to do at any point, however, is define what they mean by these terms. Furthermore, their attack on doctrinal constitutionalism - which includes ad hominem attacks while ironically calling for a more serious engagement and less ‘emotional’ or ‘easy moral evaluation’ - fails to offer any alternative solutions to a rule of law crisis that the authors themselves readily acknowledge to be a problem. Aside from a plea to pay closer attention to economic, social and political context, it is by no means clear what they would put in place of the doctrinal/legal constitutionalism that they appear to be so passionately opposed to.

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15 June 2022

British Bare Necessities

In the latest episode of the Brexit saga, the United Kingdom government has published the Northern Ireland Protocol ('NIP') Bill, by which it seeks to unilaterally disapply large parts of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland to the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement (‘WA’) concluded between the UK and the European Union. The British government has shared a summary of its legal position, seeking to justify the NIP Bill on the basis of the doctrine of necessity. However, this justification seems to be a literal, if unconvincing, attempt to make a virtue of necessity.

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11 May 2022

RePowerEU and End War by Ending Fossil Fuels

Putin’s criminal war on Ukraine has forced the Commission to say it will ‘RePowerEU’, to end Russian fossil fuels. We must clearly end all fossil fuels, and drive as fast as technology allows to 100% clean energy. To do this we should capitalise upon the vast range of legal options in our European economic constitution: that is the ‘law of enterprise’. The geopolitical situation requires us to see our law as an organic, social whole, and for all private and public actors to be on board.

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02 April 2022
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The Paradox of Efficiency: Frictions Between Law and Algorithms

On the 13th of January 2022, a Spanish Administrative court ruled in favour of algorithmic opacity. Fundación Civio, an independent foundation that monitors and accounts public authorities, reported that an algorithm used by the government was committing errors. BOSCO, the name of the application which contained the algorithm, was implemented by the Spanish public administration to more efficiently identify citizens eligible for grants to pay electricity bills. Meanwhile, Civio designed a web app to inform citizens whether they would be entitled for this grant.

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30 March 2022
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Proactive Contestation of AI Decision-making

Liberal democracies have an artificial intelligence problem. The disruptive impact and complex harms of artificial intelligence (AI) decision-making, including their intrusive surveillance, unjustifiable biases, and deceptive manipulations matter in all societies, but they matter more in open, pluralist democracies, which depend on messy human accountability processes. AI decision-making systems are notoriously resistant to demands for external scrutiny.

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