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Articles for tag: Europäisches Parlament, Rechtsstaatlichkeit, Verlust der Staatsbürgerschaft
The EU Parliament’s Abdication on the Rule of Law (Regulation)
To paraphrase a previous blog entry by Scheppele, Pech and Kelemen, if the The Decline and Fall of the European Union is ever written, historians will conclude that not only the EU’s two key intergovernmental institutions – the European Council and the Council – should bear the greatest responsibility for the EU’s demise, but also the EU Parliament. Indeed, by failing to challenge the legality of the EUCO’s December conclusions encroaching upon its own prerogatives, the EU Parliament might have just become an enabler of the ongoing erosion of the rule of law across the Union. Paradoxically, it did so after relying on incomplete and partial opinion of its own legal service advising the Parliament to trade the respect of the rule of law away for political convenience.
Constitutional Innovation, Democratic Stagnation?
The recovery plan of the Commission entitled “Next Generation EU” proposes a compromise that goes beyond the ominous lowest common denominator. With a package of EUR 750bn in total, comprising EUR 250bn in loans and the rest in grants, the Commission paves the way for both forward-looking public finance and constitutional innovation. The proposals are masterpieces of high-tech legal engineering. Again, European constitutional law evolves through crisis. Yet, again, it stands to reason how far the proposed instruments will shift the European Union towards enhancing solidarity and democracy.
EU Rule of Law Dialogues: Risks – in Context
On January 16, 2020 the European Parliament passed a resolution about the state of the Article 7(1) TEU hearings with Hungary and Poland, noting with concern that “the reports and statements by the Commission and international bodies, such as the UN, OSCE and the Council of Europe, indicate that the situation in both Poland and Hungary has deteriorated since the triggering of Article 7(1) of the TEU”. The resolution is a plea for a structured and more meaningful process in which each EU institution would exercise its existing powers in a meaningful and cooperative manner. The resolution emphasizes that the Article 7(1) TEU preventive process is one of risk assessment and one that may have actual – including budgetary – consequences.
The Junqueras Saga Continues
Notwithstanding the clear message from the ECJ, the Spanish Supreme Court has decided that the Catalan separatist leader and MEP Oriol Junqueras will not be released from prison. The contradiction between the logic of the ECJ’s judgment of December 2019 and the decision of the Spanish Supreme Court of 8 January 2020 forms a new challenge for the EU legal order, in the sense that it puts the relationship between EU law and Spanish national law under strain.
A Matter of Representative Democracy in the European Union
With its judgment in the Junqueras case, the Court adopted a functional approach to the election procedure of the European Parliament, proceeding from the principle of representative democracy as one of the core values in the EU legal order. In particular, the Court stressed the need to ensure that the composition of the European Parliament fully reflects the free choice of the Union’s citizens, by direct universal suffrage.
The European Parliament Sidelined
When the Council adopted the first set of procedural rules governing Article 7(1) TEU hearings in July 2019, it unilaterally decided to make the Commission the proxy for the Parliament. This post will show how the Council’s differential treatment of the Commission and the Parliament as activating bodies under Article 7(1) is not compatible with EU primary law and goes against in particular the principle of institutional balance.
Fairness, Trust and the Rule of Law
On October 10, 2019, the European Parliament’s Committees in charge of her proposed fields of responsibility rejected Sylvie Goulard, the French candidate for the position of Commissioner in the new Commission. It was the second hearing she had to undergo, on the basis of another around 60 pages of written Q&A. Several issues should be carefully considered.
The European Ombudsman as an Insurmountable Roadblock?
On 17 September 2019, the European Ombudsman adopted a decision rejecting a complaint against the European Parliament submitted by The Good Lobby, an NGO “committed to giving voice to under-represented public interests and bringing more citizens into the public policy process”. The action was supported by Alberto Alemanno, also co-founder and director of the NGO, and Laurent Pech. In their post of last May 2019 they already described in detail their dealings with the Authority of European political parties and European political foundations (hereinafter the Authority) and with the President of Parliament. The subsequent stages and the Ombudsman’s take reveal the wider consequences of this process and some silver linings.
The Bursting of a Constitutional Bubble
On stunts, bluffs, confidence tricks and other mind-boggling matters constitutional.
