21 January 2020/
By Theodore Christakis
Discussions on E-Evidence are heating up at the EU Parliament
Taking into consideration the significant legal challenges from the globalization of criminal evidence and considering that traditional instruments for cross-border cooperation such as Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLAT) are too slow and cumbersome, the European Commission proposed, on 17 April 2018, the “E-Evidence” legislative package (E-Evidence), which aims, to streamline cooperation with service providers and supply law enforcement and judicial authorities with expeditious tools to obtain e-evidence.
Despite difficult negotiations among EU Member States, the EU Council of Ministers succeeded in adopting on December 7, 2018 its “general approach” on E-Evidence. This led to a storm of reactions by NGOs, the industry, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and at least seven EU States, including Germany, who opposed the Council’s draft. The Netherlands, for instance, denounced the Council’s text for being adopted “too fast” and stated that it “opened the way for abuse by EU countries that lack sufficient guarantees over the rule of law and fundamental rights”. In an article published a year ago and entitled E-Evidence in a Nutshell: Developments in 2018, Relations with the Cloud Act and the Bumpy Road Ahead I presented an overview of the major features of the Council’s draft and the principal points of contention.
The months that followed showed the significant challenges that need to be addressed before a compromise is found at the EU on E-Evidence. The Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committee of the European Parliament spent most of the year 2019 in drafting seven working documents on the topic. On 8 November 2019, however, an important development took place: the LIBE Committee’s Rapporteur MEP Birgit Sippel released her draft Report on the E-Evidence draft Regulation.
Sippel’s Report constitutes a huge departure from both the Council’s general approach and from the initial Commission’s proposal. It presents… 267 amendments to the Commission’s proposal aiming to modify not only every single article in the Commission’s and the Council’s drafts, but also some important mechanisms and pillars of these drafts.Continue reading
17 January 2020/
By Segismundo Alvarez
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According to Article 19(1) TEU the CJEU “shall ensure that in the interpretation and application of the Treaties the law is observed.” The Court is therefore the ultimate interpreter of European legislation, thus guaranteeing its uniform application. To that effect, the national courts are offered the possibility of submitting to it preliminary questions (Art. 267 of the TFEU). However, for this system to function adequately it is essential not only that Member States respect this pre-eminence, but that the CJEU respects the limits of its jurisdiction. In my view, the recent opinion by the Advocate General Szpunar (hereinafter AG) in Case C-125-18 – concerning a reference rate on Spanish mortgage loans and examined here in more detail could lead the CJEU to go beyond the boundaries of its jurisdiction . Let me explain why:
The problem arises in relation to one of the questions submitted by a Spanish Court to the CJEU, which can be summarized as follows: “Is it contrary to Directive 93/13, and to Article 8 thereof, for a Spanish court to rely upon and apply Article 4(2) when that provision has not been transposed into Spanish law?”
This question touches upon an extraordinarily important issue. Article 4(2) of Directive 93/13 on consumer protection states that “Assessment of the unfair nature of the terms shall relate neither to the definition of the main subject matter of the contract nor to the adequacy of the price and remuneration, (…) in so far as these terms are in plain intelligible language.” This means that the assessment of unfairness of price and principal subject matter is excluded from the scope of the Directive.Continue reading
10 January 2020/
By Jasmin Hiry
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In a time where pessimistic views on the European project largely dominate legal and political scholarship, ‘The Future of Europe: Political and Legal Integration Beyond Brexit’ is a welcome change in perspective. In twelve chapters, the book shows the complexity of the question on the future of Europe. While not all conclusions drawn by the individual authors are positive, they at least offer a realistic picture of which issues will have to be dealt with in the future.
Antonina Bakardjieva Engelbrekt’s and Xavier Groussot’s edited book is the 13th volume in the series ‘Swedish Studies in European Law’ and builds on a conference organized by the Swedish Network for European Legal Studies in November 2017. The volume is divided into four parts, preceded by an introduction by the editors as is common for such collective works. In the latter, Antonina Bakardjieva Engelbrekt and Xavier Groussot set out the framework of the book, whose starting point is the European Commission White Paper of 2017 on the Future of Europe. While reflecting on the same underlying question as the Commission, the book does so from a slightly different angle. It limits itself to focus on three overarching themes, which in the authors’ view are ‘crucial for the sustainability of the European legal and political order’ – Institutional and Constitutional Fundaments of the Union, the Rule of Law and Security as well as the Rule of Law in the Member States. For all these themes, the individual authors, in one way or another, strive to identify conditions for a long-term, sustainable European political and legal integration. In doing so, the Brexit debate has been deliberately left aside to enable meaningful reflections on the future of Europe beyond a single Member State’s decision to leave the Union.
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7 January 2020/
By Christopher Kuner
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Introduction
On 19 December 2019, Advocate General (AG) Henrik Saugmandsgaard Øe of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) issued his Opinion in the case Data Protection Commissioner v Facebook Ireland Limited, Maximillian Schrems (Case C-311/18, referred to throughout as “Schrems II”). The case has received a great deal of attention, and raises a number of significant questions about the regulation of international data transfers under EU data protection law. I will briefly describe the facts, before analysing some key questions the Opinion deals with, and will finally draw some conclusions. The relevant paragraphs of the Opinion are indicated in parentheses.
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6 January 2020/
By Jonas Bornemann
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Recently, the CJEU has handed down two judgments in E.P. and G.S & V.G. on the interpretation of the Schengen Borders Code (SBC) and the Family Reunification Directive respectively. On that occasion, the Court was asked to clarify the conditions pursuant to which a third-country national could be considered a ‘threat to public security’. Does it suffice that immigration authorities regard a third-country national with suspicion, or are they conversely required to reproduce the exigent standards developed in free movement law? The latter would require national authorities to demonstrate that a third-country national’s personal misconduct amounted to ‘a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society’. The Court’s responses therefore affect the degree of discretion awarded to national immigration authorities in the determination of threats to public security in immigration law. Whereas these questions are indubitably of practical importance to national immigration authorities, they equally lend themselves to a reflection on national administrative discretion in EU (immigration) law more generally: When does the CJEU acknowledge a wide margin of appreciation to the benefit of national authorities, and for what reasons so?Continue reading
As the end of the year is approaching, it is time for the blog’s traditional recap of the year and celebrate the most popular posts of 2019. Keeping in mind that there is a certain bias in favour of older posts, which have had more time to become popular, we list the top 10 posts that have been read the most in the past year.
Once more, Brexit seemed to have an impact on readers’ preferences, as the most read post of 2019 is – somewhat unsurprisingly – focusing on the CJEU’s judgment in Wightman. Besides Brexit, two significant themes crystallized throughout the year, namely data protection as well as Opinion 1/17 (CETA), which was already anticipated in last year’s recap post. Lastly, both the Court’s judgment in Tjebbes, focusing on the reach of Union law in nationality matters, as well as its ruling in the Commission’s infringement procedure against Poland due to a violation of Article 19 TEU, have been prominent amongst our readership.
We would like to thank our readers for their interest in the blog and all the contributors for their efforts to give their insights in important developments in EU law. We hope to continue receiving contributions from you and new contributors (email us at info@europeanlawblog.eu). We wish our readers and contributors all the best for 2020!
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18 December 2019/
By Panagiotis Zinonos
The aim of this edited volume, published by Hart Publishing in the series “EU Law in the Member States”, is to assess Euroscepticism in the light of the various facets and degrees of national resistance to the EU and to EU law. As the editors acknowledge in their introduction, the ambition is not to provide a comprehensive account of all expressions of Euroscepticism in all the Member States, but rather to provide different perspectives. This is why they deliberately excluded the study of Brexit, as it is understood not to be an internal challenge to the effect and authority of EU law and governance.
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16 December 2019/
By Mario García
On 26 March 2019, the Spanish Constitutional Court (SCC) handed down its judgment STC 37/2019, reversing a Supreme Court’s decision that had set aside (without making a preliminary reference to the Court of Justice of the EU, or CJEU) a national law for breaching Article 3(2) of Directive 2009/72/EC on the internal market in electricity.
The SCC explained that setting aside a Spanish legislative act for breach of Union law is subject to strict constitutional scrutiny, because national laws “express the popular will.” Therefore, the SCC reasoned, an act of Parliament may only be set aside if the requirements of the acte clair or éclairé doctrine (established in the Cilfit judgment of the CJEU) are strictly adhered to. The SCC noted, however, that its constitutional standard of review would have been less demanding if the national court had found that the Spanish law did not breach EU law, as it would have applied merely a reasonableness standard of review. In other words, the SCC applies a double standard, depending on whether or not the national court intends to set aside a national law for being incompatible with Union law.
In the instant case, the Supreme Court had considered that there was no need to make a preliminary reference because there were two previous CJEU rulings addressing the underlying legal issue. However, the SCC noted that these precedents had applied an equivalent provision from the gas market directive (2009/73/EC), and not from the electricity market directive, and gave less importance to the fact that both provisions had the same content. In addition, the SCC considered that the facts of the cases were not analogous. Thus, the matter could not be considered “clarified” within the meaning of the Cilfit doctrine.Continue reading
