12 July 2023
Contesting the Ultimate Leverage to Enforce EU Law
By now it has become clear that Poland is not willing to discharge the definitive judicial penalties of over EUR 600 million which the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ordered it to pay for failing to observe coercive interim measures. When the Commission announced it would proceed to set off the outstanding amounts against money due to Poland from the EU budget, the Polish government vowed to fight the recovery ‘with all legal means’. Recently, Poland has put its money where its mouth is. It has brought four cases before the General Court to challenge the recovery. These actions have thus far evaded closer scrutiny in the legal blogosphere. However, they contain a significant challenge to the EU’s powers to enforce judicial penalties against Member States, namely as regards recovery by offsetting. As the cases raise issues which may have repercussions beyond these proceedings, this post casts a closer look at Poland’s applications and analyses their potential broader significance. Continue reading >>
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13 June 2023
Bulgaria’s Mafia State and the Failure of the CVM
Recent events in Bulgaria have brought the true extent of its rule of law decay to the fore. The wars between the highest-ranking prosecutors in the country, public testimonies by participants in crime syndicates implicating senior magistrates and politicians, and the brutal murders of potential witnesses against organized crime demonstrate that the line between organized crime, the judiciary, and the political apparatus is increasingly difficult to draw. In this post, I argue that the current escalation of Bulgaria’s rule of law crisis lays bare the European Commission’s continued mismanagement of the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM). Continue reading >>
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21 February 2023
Der Brüsseler Testballon
Über das Amtsblatt der Europäischen Union vom 13. Februar 2023 eröffnete die Kommission den Blick auf eine gegen Ungarn eingereichte Klageschrift. Im Vertragsverletzungsverfahren begehrt sie die Feststellung eines Unionsrechtsverstoßes durch das vom ungarischen Parlament in 2021 verabschiedete Gesetz über ein strengeres Vorgehen gegen pädophile Straftäter und die Änderung bestimmter Gesetze zum Schutz von Kindern. Die Kommission schlägt mit der Klageschrift einen neuen Weg ein, da sie den vorgebrachten Verstoß in einem Punkt auf Art. 2 EUV als solchen, das heißt auf die isolierte Bestimmung, stützt. Continue reading >>
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08 February 2023
Solidarity on Solidarity Levies and a Choice of Energy Mix
The Council of the European Union has adopted a series of increasingly controversial measures to deal with the energy crisis. These measures - based on the little used Art 122(1) TFEU- are in part linked to the Commission’s REPower EU plan, which aims to end Europe’s reliance on energy imports from Russia and accelerate Europe’s clean energy transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy. With each successive measure the powers of the Commission have expanded to intervene on the supply as well as the demand side of Europe’s electricity and gas markets. 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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01 February 2023
The rise of Article 122 TFEU
The last decade, and especially the past year, saw a marked increase in the EU’s reliance on Article 122 TFEU. This legal basis was used to adopt a series of measures aimed to address the health and energy crises following the COVID pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At least two of those measures are now subject to direct challenges before the General Court and the Court of Justice. From a constitutional perspective, however, it is unfortunate that these two cases will probably not invite the Courts to address the more fundamental constitutional questions raised by the Council’s recent recourse to Article 122 TFEU. Continue reading >>20 January 2023
#DefendingTheDefenders – Episode 6: The European Union
In the sixth episode of our rule of law podcast #DefendingTheDefenders with Deutscher Anwaltverein, we talk about the European Union and the state of the professional freedom of attorneys there. We want to hear from attorneys professional organisations as well as from regulators, and have spoken to both sides. Continue reading >>
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19 January 2023
Internet collapse made in Europe
Nothing has changed since the last time there was a debate regarding the relationship between telecommunication providers and online content providers. Nevertheless, the European Commission is willing to take a massive gamble and entertain the possibility of regulation to oblige online services to pay their "fair share" towards increased bandwidth consumption. This regulatory shift could risk an Internet collapse in Europe. Continue reading >>
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17 January 2023
7 Years Later: Poland as a Legal Black Hole
The EU is faced with a Member State where all of its top courts are now unlawfully composed; where every single judicial appointment procedure since 2018 is inherently defective due to the involvement of an unconstitutional body; and where core EU and ECHR requirements relating to effective judicial protection and the fundamental right to an independent court established by law have been held “unconstitutional” in 2021 and 2022 by the body masquerading as Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. Continue reading >>
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31 October 2022
Platform oversight
The Digital Services Act requires EU member states to name a “Digital Services Coordinator” (DSC) to coordinate national regulators involved in platform oversight. But the DSCs are more than just “coordinators,” as they have to fulfill specific oversight tasks themselves. That is why member states should resist the temptation to build a small-scale coordinator and instead build a strong DSC with skills in data analysis, community management and flexible case-based work. Continue reading >>
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