Articles for category: No DOI

Automated Decision-Making and the Challenge of Implementing Existing Laws

Who loves the latest shiny thing? Children maybe? Depends on the kid. Cats and dogs perhaps? Again, probably depends. What about funders, publishers, and researchers? Now that is an easier question to answer. Whether in talks provided by the tax-exempt ‘cult of TED’, or in open letters calling for a moratorium, the attention digital technologies receive today is extensive, especially those that are labelled ‘artificial intelligence’. This noise comes with calls for a new ad hoc human right against being subject to automated decision-making (ADM). While there is merit in adopting new laws dedicated to so-called AI, the procedural mechanisms that can implement existing law require strengthening. The perceived need for new substantive rules to govern new technology is questionable at best, and distracting at worst. Here we would like to emphasise the importance of implementing existing law more effectively in order to better regulate ADM. Improving procedural capacities across the legal frameworks on data protection, non-discrimination, and human rights is imperative in this regard.

5. Oktober 2023

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“Powered by the Supply Chain”

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Der zehnwöchige Streik von LKW-Fahrern auf der Raststätte in Gräfenhausen hat in den letzten Wochen für bundesweite Aufmerksamkeit gesorgt. Die Arbeiter kommen größtenteils aus Tadschikistan, Georgien und Usbekistan und arbeiten alle für die polnische Spedition Mazur. Der Streik von Gräfenhausen zeigt exemplarisch, dass die gesellschaftlichen Kämpfe ‒ in diesem Fall: Arbeitskämpfe – die Grundlage juridischer Kämpfe sind, die in Bezug auf das Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz (LkSG) bereits in vollem Gange sind.

3. Oktober 2023

The Constitution Does Not Sleep

The South Korean government is embarking on a process to amend the current Assembly Act with the aim of enforcing stricter regulations on assemblies and demonstrations. Among other things, demonstrations at night are to be generally prohibited. I argue that the legislator’s plans disregard the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court and fail to comply with standards of international law.

2. Oktober 2023

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Constitutional Pluralism and Article 370

Recently, the Indian Supreme Court finished hearing oral arguments on a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of The Constitution (Application to Jammu and Kashmir) Order, 2019 which extended all provisions of the Indian Constitution to Jammu and Kashmir. In the midst of the arguments, the Court pondered upon the nature of the relationship between the Constitution of India and the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir. While the Court is unlikely to hand down an authoritative ruling on this relationship, the exchanges between the judges and lawyers offer us a valuable avenue to explore. By analysing the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly Debates, this piece examines the nature of the relationship envisaged by the two constitutions. I argue that the constitutional principle that undergirded the previously existing constitutional relationship between India and Jammu and Kashmir is heterarchy.

2. Oktober 2023

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The Comeback of the Mixed Chamber

Three years ago, in the wake of the Weiss judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court, we proposed the creation of a “Mixed Chamber” in the Court of Justice of the European Union, to rule in last instance on judicial disputes on points of Union competence. The rationale of a Chamber so composed is not obvious. After all, in a Union in which EU Law has primacy over national law, in which the autonomy of EU law is all-pervasive and where the Court of Justice is the ultimate interpreter of EU law, why should a Mixed Chamber be needed? We believe there are at least three good reasons that make a Mixed Chamber as salient as ever.

2. Oktober 2023

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Europe’s Faustian Bargain

On Thursday, news broke that the German government had agreed to incorporating the previously rejected Crisis Regulation into the EU’s new asylum and migration pact. The decision was a radical change of course since Germany had previously consistently opposed its inclusion. Framed as allowing for more ‘flexibility’ in case of migratory surges, the Crisis Regulation’s adoption will, in effect, suspend the EU asylum system as we know it for the time being, given that recorded sea arrivals are currently nearing the 2015 levels. A crisis in need of regulation, if you will. In this blogpost, I highlight the dangerous fallacy that underpins our tolerance for the illegality that has come to characterize contemporary border control. In particular, our failure to oppose the constant expansion of the limits of the law that occurs in the name of crisis and political necessity rests on the mistaken assumption that we have nothing to lose in this race to the bottom. 

1. Oktober 2023

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False Hope for Democracy in Bosnia & Herzegovina

Bosnia & Herzegovina (B&H) is notoriously hard to govern. Scarred from a bloody war in the 1990s after the collapse of Yugoslavia, the country’s constitutional order emerged in international peace talks in the United States. What later became famous as the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) might have stopped the war but, in our opinion, sowed the seeds for complex democratic problems today. As we will show in this text, the ECtHR’s judgments represent a false hope for democracy in B&H, because ethnopolitical parties in B&H will not agree on how to implement the ECtHR’s judgments and the Office of the High Representative will not take a more active role in this context. We therefore argue against an earlier contribution on this blog by Woelk (2023), who suggested that the solution for the implementation of the ECtHR’s judgments should come from within the country, as we will show, ethnopolitical actors do not have a real interest in implementing these judgments. To put it bluntly, change from within is, alas, pie in the sky. It is much more likely that nothing changes and the powers that are remain the powers that will be.

1. Oktober 2023

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Für einen Menschenrechtspakt in der Flüchtlingspolitik

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Als Wissenschaftler*innen aus dem Asylrecht und der Fluchtforschung, die seit Jahren die Flüchtlingspolitik untersuchen und kommentieren, sehen wir die jüngsten politischen Debatten und Forderungen mit großer Sorge. Die Debatte über Flucht und Asyl wird weitestgehend faktenfrei geführt. Dadurch werden Ängste geschürt und gesellschaftliche Probleme Schutzsuchenden angelastet. Zudem werden kurzerhand rechtsstaatliche und menschenrechtliche Minimalstandards für populistische Überschriften geopfert.

30. September 2023

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