Deporting the Enemy Within
Two weeks ago, the Israeli Knesset passed a law that grants the Minister of the Interior powers to deport family members of terrorists, including Israeli citizens. The logic of this law, its instrumentalization of legitimate security concerns to not just deny the rights and membership status of minority groups but attack the foundations of a constitutional system, is not unique to contemporary Israeli politics. As such, this logic needs confronting and refuting, and this law presents an important opportunity to do so.
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Relationalizing the EU’s Fundamental Rights Responsibility
Human rights law traditionally governs a three-part relationship which connects the individual, the state, and its territory. The design of the EU’s Integrated Border Management (IBM) governance model eschews the applicability and enforceability of international and European human (fundamental) rights law by significantly reconfiguring the relationship between each of these three prongs. This contribution maps how these three traditional triggers for the applicability of human rights law are increasingly evaded in EU IBM policies, the responses to these evasion techniques and how a relational turn in the determination of human rights responsibility may be inevitable.
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Examining the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act
Finally, consensus on the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. The academic community is thus finally in a position to provide a (slightly) more definitive evaluation of the Act’s potential to protect individuals and societies from AI systems’ harms. This blog post attempts to contribute to this discussion by illustrating and commenting on the final compromises regarding some of the most controversial and talked-about aspects of the AI Act, namely its rules on high-risk systems, its stance on General Purpose AI, and finally its system of governance and enforcement.
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Greece’s Ambivalent Turn to Militant Democracy
On 2 May 2023, the Greek Court of Cassation (Areios Pagos) ruled on the certification of the candidate lists of the political parties that could lawfully participate in the Greek parliamentary elections of 21 May. It refused to certify the participation of the Hellenes National Party, the successor of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. The refusal to certify the party breaks away from previous case law on political party certification and indicates a tentative, yet incomplete embrace of militant democracy by a jurisdiction that has traditionally been hostile towards its philosophy.
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The Reform That Isn’t
As states are set to vote on the reform of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) at a Conference in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on 22 November, concerns regarding the treaty's impact on states' climate policies remain significant. In our assessment, the proposed reform fails to provide the treaty’s contracting parties with the necessary regulatory freedom to implement their climate commitments. Scheduled for the week after COP27, the vote comes at a crucial time, as scientists agree that this is the decisive decade to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Meanwhile, several EU Member States, including Germany, France, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, and Slovenia have announced unilateral withdrawals from the treaty, stating that the proposed reform fails to meet their expectations.
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Bridging Legal Longtermism and Animal Law
Discussions of animal law and legal longtermism often take place separately. That separation is misguided. Each field has much to gain from the other. In this post, we explain why animal law is important for legal longtermism. We then propose two general steps that legal longtermists can take to bridge these fields.
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The Writing is on the Wall
On 6 October 2021, Advocate General (AG) Saugmandsgaard Øe published his Opinion in the joined cases C-368/20 NW v Landespolizeidirektion Steiermark and C-369/20 NW v Bezirkshauptmannschaft Leibnitz. Six Schengen countries (Germany, France, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden) have reintroduced border controls over the past years. If the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) were to follow the AG’s Opinion, they would need to seriously rethink their practices in this regard. New evidence-based procedures and serious reasons, capable of passing a proportionality test, would be necessary to introduce border controls within the Schengen Zone.
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