Refugee migration has always been a phenomenon for many countries in the modern age and Turkey is no exception. Since the 20th Century Turkey hosted hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and refugees from different countries.
How to balance the aim of the UK to leave the European Union with the complex independence and border issues this would cause in Scotland and Northern Ireland? One possible scenario could be for Scotland to broker a five-year EFTA-EEA "naughty step" membership for the United Kingdom, at the end of which Scotland could itself become an independent EFTA-EEA member state and thus be well positioned to re-enter the European Union.
The infamous law on the Polish Constitutional Tribunal of July 7th has met with an outcry of criticism among constitutional scholars. Last week, the upper chamber of the Polish Parliament, the Senate, has introduced a number of changes to meet some of the concerns. On the whole the effort amounts to little more than statutory tinkering, though. The effect, the emasculation of constitutional control in Poland, remains unchanged.
As the dust continues to swirl around the momentous Brexit referendum result a month ago (and doesn’t show any signs of settling anytime soon) I suspect many EU sympathisers will be somewhere in the middle of the various stages of the Kübler-Ross Grief cycle: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. So, somewhat incongruosly, are the ‘leavers’. Whereas there are almost as many emotions being experienced on all sides as there are potential options on what will happen next both in terms of the UK’s future relationship with the EU as well as the future of the EU itself, in this post I want to set out a number of (pro-EU) reasons – some obvious, some optimistic, others wildly speculative – to be cheerful amidst the uncertainty created by the Brexit vote.
The opinion of the CJEU Attorney General on mass data retention has been long awaited by anyone interested in privacy rights, and more generally the relationship between states and their citizens during this period of an extended “war on terror”. While some civil rights groups have already claimed victory, on closer look the opinion of the AG is not an unmitigated success for privacy activists: It gives considerable discretion to member states to enact data retention provisions providing they meet the Digital Rights Ireland standard.
Turkey demands the extradition of eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece on Saturday 16 July after Friday’s failed coup, using an army helicopter. The key question is whether they would face a ‘real risk’ of ill-treatment contrary to Art. 3 ECHR. I tentatively conclude that such real risk is made out.
The current configuration of power in Turkey is a direct product of a deep-seated legacy of authoritarian politics, both military and “civilian”. Far from marking a rupture with the past, recent events can only be understood against the background of this tradition.
"A constitutional coup d'état": Wojciech Sadurski, one of Poland's foremost jurisprudence scholars, dissects the strategy of the Polish government to disembowel the Polish Constitutional Tribunal.
According to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, the issue of Scotland’s EU membership after Brexit is ‘a matter for the UK’. That statement is simply false: the future EU citizenship of UK nationals is not a domestic matter but an issue – perhaps the issue – for the Union as a whole to determine.
Yesterday, the UK Government has issued a statement to reassure EU nationals living in the UK as to their post-referendum status. While hundreds of EU nationals channel their relief through social media in welcoming the news and British businesses praise the Government for giving them the reassurance needed, to a more expert eye things seem much less reassuring.
13. September 2025
Giovanni Capoccia
12. September 2025
Anne Peters
12. September 2025
Anne Peters