18 December 2013/
By Nik de Boer
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“In the past it was a bit of a family, now it is a bit of a factory.”
A while ago we had the privilege of interviewing Judge Sacha Prechal for the European Law Blog about her work at the Court. Sacha Prechal is the current Dutch Judge at the European Court of Justice since June 2010. Before becoming a judge at the Court she was professor in European Law at Utrecht University. She is also a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and has worked as a legal secretary at the Court prior to her academic career.
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17 December 2013/
By Orla Lynskey
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In what circumstances is it possible for the EU to introduce a directive which limits the exercise of fundamental rights guaranteed by the EU Charter? This is just one of the many questions of constitutional significance which the Court is asked to address in Joined Cases C-293/12 and C-594/12. In his Opinion delivered on 12 December 2013, Advocate General (AG) Cruz Villalón provides plenty of food for thought for the Court. For instance, the Opinion offers interesting yet contestable insights into the relationship between the rights to privacy and data protection in the EU legal order.
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10 December 2013/
By Paul Gragl
In these times of increasing euroscepticism, critics of the European Union often contest the Union’s very raison d’être by referring to measures such as the “Bent Cucumber Regulation” and enquire after its right to legislate and adjudicate on areas that traditionally used to be within the scope of sovereign nation-states. What they actually enquire after in most of the cases is the legitimacy of the EU, having undergone an unprecedented and enormous transformation during the last 50 years from economic community to state-like polity, and its adjudicator, the Court of Justice (CJEU), whose jurisdiction ratione materiae has similarly expended and is now encompassing an unparalleled number of fields. The question remains whether the CJEU has shown too much judicial activism by using the instrument of teleological interpretation and whether it crossed the boundaries into the realm of illegitimacy. The time seems therefore ripe for a book like the one under review here, which is a volume of collected articles, edited by Maurice Adams, Henri de Waele, Johan Meeusen, and Gert Straetmans, fittingly entitled Judging Europe’s Judges: The Legitimacy of the Case Law of the European Court of Justice (Hart Publishing 2013) examining the legitimacy of the Luxembourg Court in areas as diverse as the internal market, citizenship, or the EU’s external relations.
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9 December 2013/
By Elsbeth Beumer
In the landmark cases Kendrion, Gascogne and Gascogne Germany the CJEU clarified some important procedural issues related to infringements of the reasonable time requirement. The most important legal question that the CJEU tackled is what is the appropriate remedy for infringements of the right to have the case adjudicated within a reasonable time. The CJEU had two options: the first one was to follow the Baustahlgewebe judgment in which the CJEU had concluded that the proceedings were excessively lengthy and subsequently reduced the fine the Commission had imposed upon the undertakings. The second was to follow the Der Grüne Punkt judgment where the CJEU also concluded that there had been an infringement, but required instead a separate action for damages to be lodged before the General Court. Following this path would, however, mean that the General Court itself would have to assess whether, and to what extent, the parties suffered any harm due to the excessive length of proceedings. In the present cases, the CJEU has opted for the second solution.
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6 December 2013/
By Joris Larik
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Bananas are back on the menu of the Court of Justice of the EU. The court of first instance of Brussels (Interim Decision of 17 May 2013, 196/33/13, in Dutch, not online) decided to refer a preliminary question to Luxembourg concerning the consistency of Council Regulation 1964/2005 regarding import tariffs for bananas with the EU’s obligations under the GATT. Soon the Court is to decide whether to address this question in a regular panel, or instead in a Grand Chamber. This decision itself will signal whether the Court considers this a fresh legal argument warranting scrupulous attention, or regards this simply as old, long-settled questions. In this post, I will argue that authoritative judicial clarifications would indeed be desirable in this case.Continue reading
26 November 2013/
By Benedikt Pirker
Having received from time to time requests to publish EU-law related calls for papers, we have been reflecting at the blog on how to deal with such requests. We would like the blog to remain mainly a forum for discussion on recent developments in EU (case) law, and have noted that – at least based on the statistics – this seems to meet our viewers’ needs as well. At the same time, we also continue to cover political developments and literature related to EU law, so that it would seem unjustified to exclude calls for papers and similar announcements, as they are arguably part and parcel of the academic development of EU law.
In conclusion, we have decided to have a monthly round-up of calls for papers on this blog. We will call this new category of posts – of course to be taken with a grain of salt – Neues aus dem Elfenbeinturm, news from the ivory tower. For you, distinguished readers, this means that you should please feel free to get in touch with us concerning calls for papers for EU law-related (!) topics. However, we kindly ask for your understanding that we will not publish your call immediately and as such, but in a shortened form in our monthly round-up; also, we take the liberty of refusing calls for papers that are in our view not sufficiently relevant for our readership. Looking forward to hearing from you! And now for our first admittedly short round-up…Continue reading
13 November 2013/
By S Chelvan
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The Court of Justice of the European Union (‘the Court’) in the landmark decision of X, Y and Z v Minister voor Immigratie en Asiel, has provided a template based on which the Member States can address the claims of gay asylum seekers.[1] The Court has ensured that the floodgates are not opened to enable gay and lesbian[2] applicants from the 78 countries in the world, to arrive through the portcullis of Fortress Europe, seeking, and being granted sanctuary, solely on the basis of the existence of laws which criminalise consensual same-sex conduct in their countries of origin, even when they are not enforced.
The Fleeing Homophobia report estimated in September 2011 that approximately 10,000 gay or lesbian asylum seekers seek sanctuary in Europe every year.[3] The following year, the Dutch authorities, ironically the first country in the world to recognise in 1981[4] the protection of gay men as a Particular Social Group under the 1951 Refugee Convention,[5] posed three questions to be addressed by the Court, through the prism of the 2004 Qualification Directive,[6] with respect to the asylum claims of 3 gay men from Senegal, Sierra Leone and Uganda:[7] Continue reading
