Carte Blanche for Judicial Appointments?
In the recent Valančius judgment, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (Court of Justice or ECJ), ruled on Union law requirements for the judicial appointment procedure to the EU General Court. Having previously clarified the Union law requirements for the selection procedures of national judges, the Valančius case at first sight confirms the applicability of these requirements to the selection procedure of EU General Court judges. However, a closer look reveals that the judgment risks effectively giving carte blanche for Member States to design the national stage of the appointment procedure regarding EU General Court judges.
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The Remains of the Days of Crisis: The Second Wave of Legislative COVID-19 Measures in Luxembourg
With the end of the first wave of COVID-19, the state of crisis was ended in June 2020 in Luxembourg. But its problematic features seem to have remained in the legislative action tackling the second wave. Two main differences appear between the legal approach adopted in March and the current one.
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The Protection of Health Must Take Precedence: Testing the Constitutional State of Crisis in Luxembourg
In times of neoliberalism, it is healthy hearing the Prime Minister Xavier Bettel of Luxembourg say that “the protection of health and life takes precedence over economic interests”. But this declaration came in the context of the recourse to extraordinary emergency powers, on the day before the Government declared the “state of crisis” to face the Coronavirus situation. In Luxembourg, this tool to regulate emergencies has progressively found its path into the Constitution while elsewhere in Europe philosophers or public law professors argued that a constitutional state of emergency entails the paradox of “constitutionalising the absence of constitution”. It is therefore important to reflect on the effects of the conjugation of these two discourses into the sanitary crisis and their effect on democracy and human rights protection.
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Luxleaks and the Good Faith Whistleblower
The cassation trial in the « Luxleaks » case, in which whistleblower Antoine Deltour is challenging the Luxembourg Court of Appeal's decision to convict him to a 12-month suspended sentence for having leaked 10.000 pages of documents about tax avoidance schemes in Luxembourg , is set to start on November 23. This trial will once again test the ability of the current case-law of the European Court of Human Rights to provide whistleblowers with effective protection.
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