15 July 2024
Why and How the Hungarian Presidency Must Be Stopped
It took less than a week for Viktor Orbán to make the worst predictions about the Hungarian Presidency of the Council become true. Yet with a twist. If many had warned about the danger that such a Presidency would have paralysed the internal operation of the EU, nobody expected this could also cause confusion and damage to the Union’s foreign policy. How the EU Member States will react to it may define the overall credibility of the Union on the international stage, particularly at a time when it increasingly faces significant challenges both from within and the outside. Continue reading >>
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07 June 2024
Hitting the Pause Button on the EU Project?
What is at stake in these elections. Continue reading >>
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07 June 2024
Das EU-Projekt auf der langen Bank?
Was bei diesen Wahlen auf dem Spiel steht Continue reading >>07 May 2024
Unboxing the EU Body for Ethical Standards
The creation of a dedicated EU Body for Ethical Standards carries the potential to mark a qualitative difference in the development of the EU ethics system as we know it. The contributions shows the strengths and looming pitfalls of the new Body. Continue reading >>
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02 February 2023
Qatargate: A Missed Opportunity to Reform the Union
When the news broke about the arrest of EU Parliament’s Vice-President Eva Kaili in flagrant offence for corruption and money laundering, many observers instantly qualified Qatargate as the largest and the most damaging scandal affecting the European integration process since its inception. Since then, this prediction proves truer day by day, revelation after revelation. Yet, despite unprecedented media coverage and a shocked public, this scandal has not yet generated within the EU and national political class a good enough response to mitigate its damaging effects. EU leaders can hardly afford to miss this unique opportunity to prepare a convincing answer to the question many citizens will soon be asking: Why vote in the next EU Parliament’s election in 2024? Continue reading >>
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31 August 2022
Why Academic Ivory Towerism Can’t Be The Answer
At a time in which a worrying number of risks conspire to threaten the end of democracy and humanity – from climate change to uncontrolled new technologies –, to confine the remit of the legal scholar to the narrow boundaries of academic purity appears ahistorical at best, irresponsible at worst. Continue reading >>08 June 2022
Censuring von der Leyen’s Capitulation on the Rule of Law
The spectre of a motion of censure is looming over the von der Leyen Commission. While this rather extraordinary, perhaps desperate, measure appears unlikely to attain the required number of signatures to be tabled – and even less likely to be adopted by the European Parliament –, this initiative deserves some scrutiny. Perhaps even some praise by those who still believe in the primacy of law over power. Continue reading >>
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26 April 2022
The Court of Justice of the EU goes (almost) public
While the broadcasting of the delivery does not add much value (the texts are generally made available online at the time of their live reading in Luxembourg) to its declared goal of facilitating “the public’s access to its judicial activity”, that of the public hearings appears a major game-changer in the Court’s stance vis-à-vis the public-at-large. And that despite the many precautions accompanying the introduction of such a major rehaul of the Court’s publicity policy regarding its hearings, Continue reading >>25 February 2021
The EU Parliament’s Abdication on the Rule of Law (Regulation)
To paraphrase a previous blog entry by Scheppele, Pech and Kelemen, if the The Decline and Fall of the European Union is ever written, historians will conclude that not only the EU’s two key intergovernmental institutions – the European Council and the Council – should bear the greatest responsibility for the EU’s demise, but also the EU Parliament. Indeed, by failing to challenge the legality of the EUCO’s December conclusions encroaching upon its own prerogatives, the EU Parliament might have just become an enabler of the ongoing erosion of the rule of law across the Union. Paradoxically, it did so after relying on incomplete and partial opinion of its own legal service advising the Parliament to trade the respect of the rule of law away for political convenience. Continue reading >>04 January 2021