Schengen Entry Bans for Political Reasons? The Case of Lyudmyla Kozlovska
On 13 August 2018, Lyudmyla Kozlovska, an Ukrainian national and the President of the Open Dialog Foundation (ODF) in Poland, was detained following a passport control at the Belgian airport in...
View ArticleHow to Stop Funding Autocracy in the EU
In last week’s Verfassungsblog editorial, Max Steinbeis expressed some skepticism that the EU could enforce a judgment that a Member State simply refused to honor. True, the EU is not a Weberian,...
View ArticleBeyond the Spectacle: The European Parliament’s Article 7 TEU Decision on...
Emotions were high and voices loud while and after the European Parliament adopted its decision to trigger an art. 7 TEU procedure against Hungary this week. Once the dust settles, it might be helpful...
View ArticleThe Four Elements of the Autocrats’ Playbook
Poland and Hungary are EU Member States where the rule of law is not safeguarded, and there is concern that more states could soon follow. Meanwhile, the Union’s position seems to be relatively weak in...
View ArticleThe Polish Judicial Council v The Bulgarian Judicial Council: Can You Spot...
On 17 September 2018, in Bucharest, the General Assembly of the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary (ENCJ) voted to suspend the membership of the Polish National Judicial Council (KRS) due...
View Article“Existential Judicial Review” in Retrospect, “Subversive Jurisprudence” in...
Does anybody still remember what has happened to the Polish Constitutional Court (“the Court”) – the first institution to be razed to the ground by the Polish counter-revolution? In the whirlwind times...
View ArticleWill Poland, With Its Own Constitution Ablaze, Now Set Fire to EU Law?
On Wednesday Polish media announced that the Polish justice minister and Prosecutor-General Zbigniew Ziobro had on 4 October expanded his constitutional review application from 23 August (case K 7/18)....
View ArticlePoland’s Supreme Administrative Court recognizes Same-sex Parents
On 10 October 2018, the SAC overruled a judgment of the Administrative Court in Cracow (ACC) and previous administrative decisions related to the refusal to enter a British birth certificate into the...
View ArticleInterim Revolutions
The decision of 19 October of the Vice-President of the Court of Justice, ordering the Republic of Poland to suspend the effects of the Judiciary Reform Act and, in particular, to ensure that no...
View ArticleConstitutional Pluralism between Normative Theory and Empirical Fact
It has been recently floated in legal academia and the blogosphere that it is high time for constitutional pluralism to bow out of the European scene. The reason? It has been alleged to be (1)...
View ArticleThough this be Madness, yet there’s Method in’t: Pitting the Polish...
At the beginning of October 2018, Poland’s Prosecutor General submitted a request to the Constitutional Tribunal to examine the compliance of Article 267 TFEU with the Polish Constitution, so far as it...
View ArticleWhat Being Left Behind by the Rule of Law Feels Like, Part II
This the second of two posts on the rule of law in Hungary. Part I is here. As this litany of procedures suggests so far European constitutional actors must have done their best: they made it clear to...
View ArticleNever Missing an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity: The Council Legal...
If The Decline and Fall of the European Union is ever written, historians will conclude that the EU’s two key intergovernmental institutions – the European Council and the Council – should bear the...
View ArticleEurope’s Rule of Law Dialogues: Process With No End in Sight
Europe’s dialogues on the rule of law seem to be going really well lately. Since the Article 7 TEU procedures were launched in earnest against Poland and then Hungary, the feisty national governments...
View ArticleEpisode 5 of the Celmer Saga – The Irish High Court Holds Back
When we last left the now notorious and long-running Celmer saga, the High Court of Ireland in its fourth outing had held that it needed to ultimately determine if there were substantial grounds for...
View ArticleWhy the EU Commission and the Polish Supreme Court Should not Withdraw their...
Amendment to the Supreme Court Act On 21 November 2018 the Sejm passed an act amending the Supreme Court (SC) Act. The amendment reinstated the previous retirement age for judges who performed their...
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Introduction: Constitutional Resilience and the German Grundgesetz
Contemporary authoritarianism, while not having entirely abandoned the aims and methods of its ancestors, has been undergoing a reinvention in recent years. It no longer attacks democracy and the rule...
View ArticleHow populist authoritarian nationalism threatens constitutionalism or: Why...
The problem with movements and parties spearheaded by “populist” leaders such as Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán, Kaczyński or Trump is not that they happen to embrace more nationally focused policies that...
View ArticleConstitutional Resilience
I. Introduction Resilience of a body in general describes the ability to cope with an attack on its immune system. What is undisputed in psychology or biology is also valid for legal bodies, in...
View ArticleBeyond Electoral Mandates—Oversight and Public Participation
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.1)W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” 1928. These despairing lines from W.B. Yeats, written in 1928, resonate with current...
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