Category: General

EU Law and MOOCs: A marriage waiting to happen

In view of the current hype on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), spawning recently a grant competition of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft and iversity for courses to be hosted, publicly available and free of charge, on a Europe-based MOOC platform, a few thoughts an EU law, legal education and MOOCs are in order. It should be added at the outset that the author of this post is coordinating one of the bids for a MOOC grant for a course entitled “Europe in the World: Law and Policy Aspects of the EU in Global Governance”, which makes him particularly invested in this issue. The author is grateful to European Law Blog Team that he was granted the opportunity to share his thoughts on these developments, as well as his bid, in the form of this post.

Transnational law meets transnational education

Ever since Prof. Sebastian Thrun’s historic feat of attracting more than 150,000 students to his Massive Open Online Course on artificial intelligence two years ago, MOOCs have started to shake up the landscape and minds of higher education. In a kind of “gold rush”, academics want to join this remarkable development, and companies are being founded to provide platforms for such ventures, predominantly in the US, but also more recently in Europe. Beyond subjects closer to technology, such as computer science or engineering, the social sciences and humanities have also come to feel the potential and attraction of MOOCs. Continue reading →

Multi-Speed Europe: Enhanced Cooperation or Increased Litigation?

Background

The idea of a ‘multi-speed Europe’ finds its concrete expression in a range of European Union (EU) policy fields from the single currency to EU criminal law. As the product of specific treaty authorizations, these examples of ‘enhanced cooperation’ have become a familiar means by which European integration has deepened while allowing individual states to avoid being bound by measures adopted in a new field of cooperation. With the Amsterdam Treaty, a new capacity was created to deploy enhanced cooperation on a more ad hoc policy issue basis, particularly where legislative negotiations had failed to resolve disagreements between Member States.

Yet the new capacity remained unused until after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, which amended the provisions on enhanced cooperation (now Article 20 TEU and Articles 326-334 TFEU). The new provisions were deployed for the first time to permit a group of states to adopt a regulation on the law applicable to divorce and legal separation. However, it was the second authorization of enhanced cooperation in the area of the EU unitary patent which was more controversial and which gave rise to legal actions by Spain and Italy seeking an annulment of the authorizing decision. Both states had objected to the proposal to restrict the languages used for submission of patent applications to English, French and German. In the absence of the unanimity required for the establishment of the language regime (Article 118 TFEU), legislative negotiations had reached a stalemate and so the decision was taken by the Member States – with the exception of Spain and Italy – to authorize enhanced cooperation. The two countries then brought legal proceedings seeking the annulment of the authorizing decision.

This post considers the implications of this litigation for the use of enhanced cooperation with a particular eye towards the legal action which has been launched by the United Kingdom challenging the use of enhanced cooperation for the adoption of the controversial Financial Transactions Tax (FTT). Continue reading →

On the Rocky Road to Accession: Final Draft of EU’s Accession Agreement to ECHR Approved

“The Union shall accede to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.” Article 6, paragraph 2, TEU

The EU took another step towards accession to the ECHR with the finalization, late last week, of the Draft Revised Agreement on the Accession of the EU to the ECHR, after almost three years of negotiations.

However, as Antoine Buyse notes over on ECHR Blog, the road to accession remains long and winding. The next hurdle will be to request an opinion from the Court of Justice on the compatibility of the agreement with the EU Treaties, pursuant to Article 218(11) TFEU. The agreement would then require the unanimous approval of the Council, in addition to the approval of all Member States “in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements” (Article 218(8) TFEU). Finally, the agreement will have to be ratified by all States of the ECHR. Continue reading →

Leth: Court Rules Out Francovich Claim on the Basis of the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive

The facts of the Leth case are relatively simple. Ms. Leth bought a house close to Vienna-Schwechat Airport. However, following her purchase of that property, several works were carried out on the airport, most probably increasing the use and thus noise it produced. Probably much to miss Leth’s disliking, it further turned out that many of these works were carried out without any environmental impact assessment. The reason for this absence of an environmental impact assessment was a belief on the part of the Austrian authorities that no such assessment was necessary on the basis of the national laws implementing the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive (Currently codified in the EIA Directive). This is a widely held belief on the part of authorities that prefer executive action over cumbersome procedures that are time-consuming and costly. However, often this belief is the result more of a desired outcome than a correct interpretation of the EIA Directive, making this one of the most frequently invoked directives in EU environmental law. Indeed, significant aspects of direct effect have been established and refined on the basis of cases turning on the EIA Directive (think of Kraaijeveld and Wells).

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Casting the net of fundamental rights protection: C-617/10 Åkerberg Fransson

Today’s decision by the Grand Chamber in C-617/10 Åkerberg Fransson is a landmark decision on the scope of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, EU constitutional law, and the relationship between national and EU law in general. As I explained in an earlier post, it was not clear, until today, whether the Charter had the same scope of fundamental rights protection as under the ‘old’ regime of fundamental rights protection ensured by the CJEU. The CJEU dealt with the issue head on stating that article 51 (1) of the Charter ‘confirms the Court’s case-law relating to the extent to which actions of the Member States must comply with the requirements flowing from the fundamental rights guaranteed in the legal order of the European Union’ (para. 18).

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Scottish Independence: a Question of International Law or of the EU’s “New Legal Order”? (Part I)

Monday, 11 February, may prove to be a decisive day in Holyrood’s quest for independence.

David Cameron presented a prelude of sorts on Sunday evening, issuing a statement which proclaimed: “Britain works well. Why break it?” Shortly thereafter, the UK Government announced that it would publish a legal opinion prepared by two eminent international lawyers, Professor James Crawford and Professor Alan Boyle of the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh respectively, on the legal aspects arising from Scottish independence. A pre-released summary indicated that the opinion would confirm the position held by the UK Government as well as the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso (expressed in a letter to the House of Lords), according to which an independent Scotland would become a new state in international law and would not “inherit” any of the treaty obligations of the UK, but would instead have to renegotiate and reapply to join international organizations, including the European Union. Continue reading →

European Law Blog celebrates its first birthday!

Today is the first anniversary of the European Law Blog! The Editorial team would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our wonderful readers and contributors for accompanying the blog through its first 12 months.

We are delighted with the response we have received and look forward to another year of POMFRs, Luxemburgerlis and vibrant discussion on current EU law issues. We even have a few new projects in the pipeline for 2013, which we hope to share with you in due course.

We have really enjoyed writing here and we hope that you will continue to visit, to read, to comment and to tweet!

The seal products cases (I): The notion of ‘regulatory act’ according to AG Kokott

One of the hottest topics in international trade law currently is the seals dispute between the EU and a number of arctic countries, notably Canada and Norway. The dispute has not only given rise to proceedings before the WTO (providing more wood for the ongoing fiery debate on the legality of PPM-measures), but has also found its way to Luxembourg in the form of a number of direct actions for annulment of EU regulations banning trade in seal products.

Today’s Opinion of Advocate General Kokott (Opinion in Case C-583/11P Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and Others v Parliament and Council) concerns one of those cases. It also concerns one of the most contentious issues in EU law: the locus standi of individuals for a direct action for annulment of EU legal acts (see my previous post on the judgment of the General Court). As is well known, the CJEU has taken a very restrictive stance on the locus standi of non-privileged applicants (that is: individual parties, rather than privileged applicants such as Member States and the EU institutions, as mentioned in the second and third paragraph of article 263 TFEU). The criteria for direct and individual concern are so strict that it is very difficult for individuals to directly challenge EU legal acts. In particular, the requirement for individual concern, also known as the ‘Plaumann formula’ (see the bottom of page 107 in Case 25/62 Plaumann v. Commission), is especially hard for individuals to meet.

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Top 10 most read posts of the year

As the end of the year is approaching many news sites, radio stations and other media usually make lists to summarize the year in numbers. Following this tradition I would like to list the posts that were most read by our readers (according to Google Analytics). This is of course not entirely fair to the most recent posts written, since they had less time to become popular among readers, but I think it is a fun exercise nonetheless. So here we go:

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The Commission’s double role in competition law enforcement: the Otis case

CC from http://www.esbnycleasing.com/gallery_12.phtmlOn November 6th, the Grand Chamber of the CJEU issued a ruling in Case C-199/11 (Europese Gemeenschap v Otis NV and Others). The case concerns the principle of effective judicial protection (laid down in Article 47 of EUCFR) and the private enforcement of competition law. The Brussels Commercial Court referred the issue for a preliminary ruling in the course of a dispute between Otis and the other businesses and the EU, represented by the Commission.

The main controversy in the case was whether the principle of effective judicial protection was adequately safeguarded. The Commission, in this case, played a double role: first as the public enforcer of the EU competition law, and second as the victim of the anticompetitive practices. This meant, in a nutshell, that the Commission was asking for damages in a private suit on the basis of its own previous findings of anticompetitive behavior.

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