21 December 2023
Constitutional Identity vs. Human Rights
In two recent Latvian cases concerning the Russian-speaking minority decided respectively in September and November 2023, the ECtHR made clear that protection of constitutional identity has now been elevated to a legitimate aim for a differential treatment under the Convention. This post explores how the protection of constitutional identity has been deployed to enable a collective punishment by association with a former occupier, and how the ECtHR’s reasoning has effectively endorsed such a punishment, which is unbefitting of a liberal democratic system the ECHR aspires to represent. Until the three cases were decided, no liberal European democracy could argue without losing face that suppressing a large proportion of its population was its constitutional identity – one of the goals of its statehood. Today, this claim is seemingly kosher, marking a U-turn in the understanding of what the European human rights protection system is for minorities in Europe. Continue reading >>
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Everybody’s Business
War has devastated Sudan since it first broke out on 15 April 2023. What started as a power play between the country’s two most powerful armies, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has since metastasized into a major civil war. International actors have not paid this war the high-level attention it requires and deserves. This blog explains why international actors need to pay more attention to what is happening in the strategically located country at the crossroads between the Red Sea and the Sahel, between the Arab and African worlds. The war threatens Sudan’s integrity as a state, displaces millions and draws in neighbouring and other regional countries, all in a region already in turmoil because of coups, insurgencies and violent extremism. Continue reading >>
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20 December 2023
Can Germany Remain Silent?
Is Germany legally obligated to condemn violations of international humanitarian law? This argument was recently put forward in an article on Verfassungsblog. Elsewhere it was claimed that Germany, along with other States failing to utilize their full repertoire of diplomatic options (including “[calling] for a permanent ceasefire”), is in breach of its own IHL-responsibilities. Admittedly, international law does have a say when organs of States speak. Nevertheless, the intricacies of this matter go beyond first impression. I submit that such a duty is not as easy to derive in the present case as is suggested by opposing views. Continue reading >>A European Dialogue on Strike Action
With its decision in Humpert and others v Germany of 14 December 2023, the European Court of Human Rights settled a long-standing debate: The ban on strikes for German Civil Servants does not violate the rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. This decision ends the strategic litigating efforts of the applicants and their union to obtain the right to strike for the approximately 1.7 million civil servants in Germany. The judgment is also the culmination of an extraordinarily intense dialogue between Strasbourg and Karlsruhe. Continue reading >>Warum wir einen Verbotsvertrag für fossile Brennstoffe brauchen
Während der COP 28 Konferenz schlossen sich Palau, Kolumbien, Samoa und Nauru offiziell der Forderung nach einem Vertrag über die Nichtverbreitung fossiler Brennstoffe an. Die Ankündigungen erfolgten in Dubai, während viele Organisationen der Zivilgesellschaft und Regierungsdelegationen sich noch für einen COP-Beschluss zum Ausstieg aus der Förderung fossiler Brennstoffe einsetzten. Diese eigenständige Vertragsinitiative, die vom Europäischen Parlament, der WHO sowie von zahlreichen Städten und wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen unterstützt wird, wird von 12 Staaten angeführt, von denen 11 Inselstaaten sind, die am stärksten von der Klimakrise betroffen sind. Wie ich darlegen werde, ist es in der Tat eine gute Idee, einen neuen Vertrag über das Verbot der Förderung fossiler Brennstoffe auszuhandeln, auch wenn sich einige Öl, Gas und Kohle exportierende Länder weigern, daran teilzunehmen. Continue reading >>Militant Rule of Law
To protect the rule of law based legal system against abusive use of the loopholes, imperfections, contradictions of the law, to avoid legal inertia legal positivist arguments are needed to convince and mobilize the legal mind. The same applies when the blind fortune of democracy provides the opportunity to erase the legally enthroned injustice and domination of illiberal regimes. When it comes to legal enactments that serve legal cheating the rule of law must respond to systemic abuse of the law, and that requires and justifies a rule of law based exceptionalism and a systemic remedy. Continue reading >>Not Just Abortion
On 14 December 2023, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in the case M.L. v. Poland. The ECHR decided that the restrictions on abortion rights that Poland had violated Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights. Contrary to the hopes of the initiators of the case, this is not a European Roe v. Wade moment. The ECHR again refused to affirm that Article 8 can be interpreted as conferring a right to abortion. Nevertheless, the ECHR made significant findings regarding Polish rule of law violations. Continue reading >>
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Between Return and Protection
Last month, the ECJ responded to a preliminary reference of the Regional Court in Brno concerning Czechia’s so-called return procedure. The ECJ ruled that a third country national cannot be subject to a return decision if they applied for international protection and a first-instance decision on that application has not yet been delivered. Curiously, the ECJ thereby answered a question it had not actually been asked, while contradicting the conclusion of the Grand Chamber of the Czech Supreme Administrative Court (“SAC”), rendered shortly before. While the ECJ’s ruling will nonetheless improve some of the problems that have inhered within Czechia’s approach to international protection and return procedures, its failure to answer the referred question constitutes a missed opportunity to facilitate a productive dialogue with referring courts in an area of law where preliminary references have been exceedingly rare. Continue reading >>
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A Duty to Rescue
Reports of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean have, unfortunately, become more and more frequent in recent years. A recently published MSF report has highlighted the role ‘pushbacks and systematic non-assistance to those at risk of drowning proliferate’ play in this regard. The report refers specifically to two events that happened in 2023 in which national authorities failed to launch rescue operations despite receiving the information on migrants in distress at sea hours before the tragedy. In this blogpost, we assess whether a coast guard’s failure to act in situations of migrants in distress might violate an incumbent criminal law duty to rescue. We map the core elements of the duty to rescue under criminal law and how they might apply to such a chain of events, using the abovementioned event of 14 June as an example. Continue reading >>
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19 December 2023
Neue Realitäten im Landtag
Den Ruf als „härtestes Parlament Deutschlands“ hatte sich der Landtag in Wiesbaden schon lange vor dem Einzug der AfD erworben. Offenbar haben die Verhältnisse im Wiesbadener Stadtschloss in den letzten Jahren aber eine andere Qualität erreicht. Jedenfalls wird man so die „dringliche“, parteiübergreifende Gesetzesinitiative, bestehend aus CDU, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, SPD und FDP, verstehen dürfen. Sie trägt den Namen Demokratiepaket, ist offensichtlich gegen die AfD richtet und wurde am 12.12.2023 noch schnell vom alten Landtag verabschiedet, um für die neue Legislatur gerüstet zu sein. Parlamentarismus kennt keinen Endzustand, sondern ist Sisyphusarbeit. Continue reading >>The EU’s Pacing Problem
The EU regulators face a pacing problem. This has been demonstrated several times during the legislative process of the AI Act itself: for example, the initial Commission proposal from 2021 did not include a definition of General Purpose AI (GPAI). The proposal did not anticipate the rise of Large Language Models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 but only addressed AI systems designed for specific purposes. This lacuna in the original proposal has haunted the EU Parliament, Council and Commission in the past final weeks of the trilogue negotiations, where the inclusion of so-called Frontier Models has been hotly contested. This blog post explores potential boosters for the EU's capacity to regulate AI: delegated legislation, soft law, and a centralized AI office. Continue reading >>
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One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
This blogpost unpacks some of the ‘democratic paradoxes’ that come with the ‘Defence of Democracy’ package (DoD package), which the European Commission published on Tuesday, 12th of December. While a Recommendation on promoting civic engagement and citizen participation (Civil Society Recommendation) reflects positive changes in the Commission’s conception of democracy, the ‘Directive establishing harmonised requirements in the internal market on transparency of interest representation carried out on behalf of third countries’ (Foreign Funding Directive) directly contradicts this emphasis on a more citizen-centred model and is illustrative of a broader dilemma: how to defend democracy in the EU’s multi-level constitutional space, while keeping the sensitive legal tools for doing so out of the hands of the enemies of democracy that are already – and for the time being irreversibly – on its inside. Continue reading >>
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“This Is Not a Foreign Agents Law”
On Tuesday, 12 December 2023, the Commission adopted its long-awaited Defence of Democracy package, which includes a Proposal for a Directive on Transparency of Interest Representation on behalf of Third Countries. Dubravka Šuica, Commissioner for Democracy and Demography seemed eager to clarify what the Directive is not. Šuica emphasised that the Directive “is not a foreign agents law”. But the more a statement is repeated, the less credible it appears. Rather, the opposite appears to be true. And so, the devil is not in the name, it lies in enforcement. Despite the Commission’s assertion that full harmonisation of the Directive prevents Member States from gold-plating or potentially worse activities, the Commission has limited control over how Member States apply and enforce their national laws. This is the biggest risk of the proposal. Continue reading >>18 December 2023
Thüringer Tendenzen nach der Causa Sesselmann
Im Juni 2024 stehen in acht Bundesländern Kommunalwahlen an, die viele Personen in kommunale Ämter spülen dürften, deren Verfassungstreue zweifelhaft ist. Der Umgang damit stellt eine wehrhafte Verfassungsordnung vor größte Herausforderungen. Das Thüringer Innenministerium adressiert diese Schwierigkeiten nun auch in einem Handlungsleitfaden, den es Anfang November an das Landesverwaltungsamt und die zuständigen Wahlausschüsse verschickt hat und der die Prüfkriterien der Rechtsprechung aufbereitet. Vor diesem Hintergrund drängt sich die Frage auf, ob nicht nur für das Beamtenrecht mit der „Causa Sesselmann“ ein problematischer Präzedenzfall geschaffen worden ist. Continue reading >>Die Implementation der IHRA-Arbeitsdefinition Antisemitismus ins deutsche Recht – eine rechtliche Beurteilung
Diese Beurteilung wurde am 5. Dezember 2023 an die Fraktionsvorsitzenden, an die Mitglieder der Ausschüsse Inneres und Recht sowie an die Ausschussbüros der anderen beteiligten Ausschüsse des Bundestags versandt. Nachdem in der Presse über dieses Papier berichtet wurde, haben wir uns entschieden, sie zu veröffentlichen. Continue reading >>(State) Immunity for Palestine?
On December 11, 2023, the Berlin Public Prosecutor's Office decided to discontinue investigations against Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian National Authority. The declared reason for doing so lies in his immunity pursuant to Section 20 para. 1 of the German Courts Constitution Act (GVG). The decision is instructive with regard to Germany's understanding of sovereign immunity and Palestine's role in international relations. Continue reading >>
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Im Parlamentsrevier
Die Bundestagspräsidentin übt nach Art. 40 Abs. 2 S. 1 GG das Hausrecht und die Polizeigewalt in den Gebäuden des Bundestages aus. Beide Befugnisse gehören zum Kernbestand der Parlamentsautonomie, also des Rechts des Parlaments, seine (grundlegenden) Angelegenheiten selbst zu regeln und wahrzunehmen. Um die Polizeigewalt durchsetzen zu können, verfügt der Bundestag als einziges deutsches Parlament über eine eigene Polizei, für die Bundestagspräsidentin nun eine transparente und detaillierte Rechtsgrundlage schaffen möchte. Trotz vieler Vorzüge wäre ein solches Gesetz verfassungswidrig. Continue reading >>Kreative Sondervermögensgestaltung
Zentrales Element der verteidigungspolitischen Zeitenwende, die der Bundeskanzler drei Tage nach Beginn der russischen Vollinvasion in die Ukraine im Februar 2022 ausgerufen hat, ist das Sondervermögen für die Bundeswehr. Sein rechtlicher Ausgangspunkt ist der 2022 neu geschaffene Art. 87a Abs. 1a GG, der dem Bund die Errichtung eines Sondervermögens mit Kreditermächtigungen in Höhe von einmalig bis zu 100 Milliarden Euro „zur Stärkung der Bündnis- und Verteidigungsfähigkeit“ erlaubt. Eine Verankerung auf Verfassungsebene ist für Sondervermögen nicht prinzipiell erforderlich, erlaubte hier jedoch die in S. 2 geregelte Ausnahme von der Schuldenbremse, die andernfalls auch für Sondervermögen gilt. Ein Rückgriff auf die Ausnahme von der Schuldenbremse für Naturkatastrophen oder außergewöhnliche Notsituationen (Art. 115 Abs. 2 S. 6 GG) war daher nicht notwendig. Aus diesem Grund ist das Sondervermögen Bundeswehr von der richtungsweisenden Entscheidung des BVerfG zum Klima- und Transformationsfonds nicht unmittelbar betroffen. Continue reading >>
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17 December 2023
The EU’s Faustian Bargain
Twelve years into the EU’s rule of law crisis, this week has demonstrated that EU leaders are still unwilling to confront their own complicity in Orbán’s rise and to do something about it. Is this sad spectacle a price worth paying in exchange for a symbolic gesture of goodwill to Ukraine? That is the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is this: if the EU continues to treat the rule of law as a bargaining chip and to make promises it won’t keep, for how much longer will our Union remain a club worth joining? Continue reading >>15 December 2023
Wie viel Unwahrheit verträgt die Kunst?
Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz verkündet im Namen der Bundesregierung, ein Verbotsverfahren gegen die AfD anzustrengen. Diesen Eindruck erweckt ein Video, das das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (ZPS) am 27. November veröffentlichte, später entfernte und mit einem Urheberhinweis zu Beginn des Videos neu hochlud. Am 15. Dezember 2023 erklärte das ZPS, dass YouTube das Deepfake-Video in seiner ursprünglichen Form wieder freigeschaltet hat. Im konkreten Fall dürfte sich ein Verbreitungsverbot des Videos dennoch als verhältnismäßiger Eingriff in die Kunstfreiheit des ZPS erweisen. Continue reading >>
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