Resetting the Constitutional Tribunal in Poland after the Law and Justice Party's eight years in power is a Herculean task. However, the constitutional and political room for maneuver for the new government turns out to be quite limited.
Ende Februar hat die Polizei die mutmaßliche RAF-Terroristin Daniela Klette in Berlin festgenommen. Dies haben Hinweise ermöglicht, an die ein Journalist mittels der Gesichtserkennungssoftware PimEyes gelangt war – allerdings unter Verstoß gegen das Datenschutzrecht. Dass die Polizei die Hinweise verwendet, ist verfassungsrechtlich problematisch, denn sie selbst dürfte PimEyes nicht einsetzen. Dies hindert die Polizei aber nicht daran, aufgrund von Hinweisen durch Private, die PimEyes generiert hat, gegen bestehende Gefahren einzuschreiten und auch nicht daran, strafprozessuale Ermittlungen aufzunehmen.
Is the European Union once again about to duck the challenge of constitutional reform? Even the imperative of Ukraine’s accession does not impel the EU to strengthen its governance. The European Parliament has made formal proposals to change the treaty from unanimity to QMV. The Commission equivocates. The European Council simply sits on the dossier, looking for excuse after excuse. Worse, a new idea is being floated in Brussels that mixes bad law with bad politics. The ruse is to use Article 49 TEU, the accession clause, instead of Article 48. I explain here why this approach will neither help Ukraine nor salvage the Union’s self-respect.
I chose for years to consider migrations and borders from a pluridisciplinary perspective. Such a pluridisciplinary approach reveals to be demanding: it needs both to be developed with discipline, and to be opened to wanderings. You have to accept to be confronted with personal controversies, to be faced with internal discourse on the method.
Through the representations of Europe that it conjures up and conveys, the European Court of Justice significantly influences the EU’s self-perceived identity. In that sense, it contributes to the shaping of a European polity, i.e. a European political community united by shared representations about its history and identity.
Whereas law-in-context analyses of Community law were relatively rare in the early 1990s, they seemed to flourish from that point onwards. Unsurprisingly, even “mainstream” journals, such as the Common Market Law Review, now strive to attract pieces that combine legal analysis with social, political or economic insights. Does that mean that we are all “contextualists” now? Not in my view.
The African continent is currently witnessing the creation of the largest regional free trade area in the world. The African Continental Free Trade Area represents a significant milestone in Africa’s socio-economic development. However, this development is also significant in another respect: A recently adopted special Protocol on Women and Youth in Trade has the potential to blaze the trail for gender-transformative intra-African trade. The protocol thus confirms a general trend in international economic law to acknowledge and address the gendered nature of trade.
In 1957, when the Treaty of Rome was signed and founded what later became the European Union (EU), four out of six of the original Member States were colonial powers. An important methodological question for EU law research is how this historical fact has affected the development of EU law. I argue that answering the question of how Europe’s centuries long history of colonialism has shaped EU law is not just a historical exercise but also a starting point for an examination of EU law of today.
The use of the terms 'decolonial', 'postcolonial' and 'race' has become fashionable, particularly in Anglo-American legal scholarship. However few legal scholars in recent years have ventured into postcolonial approaches to European Union law. I will argue that one cannot understand the history and law of the European Union if one fails to understand and acknowledge colonialism.
The Spanish amnesty for the Catalan independence movement is a victory for the rule of law, rather than a defeat. It is not an exemption from punishment otherwise due, but instead a reflection of the fact that the acts now amnestied should never have been subject to criminal prosecution in the first place. It is thus also a way for Spain to return to compliance with its obligations under European and international human rights law.
13. September 2025
Giovanni Capoccia
12. September 2025
Anne Peters
12. September 2025
Anne Peters