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31 August 2023

How to Form the Czech Constitutional Court?

Politically, summers in the Czech Republic are often quiet. This year is different. A newly elected president, Petr Pavel, is selecting almost all of the fifteen members of the Czech Constitutional Court ("CCC") during the next two years. Unexpectedly, Pavel's selection process has sparked a great deal of controversy and discussion about how a president should choose constitutional judges. What happened? And what are the main lessons to be learned from the current situation in the Czech Republic? Continue reading >>
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20 September 2020

Lawful composition – the EFTA Court’s approach

On 10 September 2020, the British Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union, Eleanor Sharpston, was replaced by the Greek lawyer Athanasios Rantos. Most of the commentators of the incident, which stirred up a great deal of dust, focus on the question whether the termination of Ms. Sharpston’s mandate on 10 September 2020 was lawful. The following considerations, on the other hand, examine the legal situation in the event that her expulsion from the ECJ was after Brexit in line with EU law. A precedent of the EFTA Court in 2016 may be relevant in this context. Continue reading >>
03 June 2020

The Faceless Court

The authority of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the veritable Supreme Court of the European Union, has come under attack. In May 2020, the German Constitutional Court challenged the authority of the ECJ by holding that the Luxembourg court had acted beyond its mandate by allowing the quantitative easing measures issued by the European Central Bank. While many remain fixated on how the German decision has triggered the EU constitutional crisis, the public may have overlooked a more fundamental problem that has long beset the legitimacy of the ECJ—its own institutional failures. Continue reading >>