An introductory blogpost series for everyone

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By Jakub Karczewski, Robin Leick [1]

You might have heard about the negotiations on the EU budget [2] and the EU coronavirus recovery fund recently.[3] You might also have heard about the idea of making payouts from the budget and the fund conditional upon the respect for the rule of law.[4] This idea has not emerged out of nowhere – rule of law crises in some EU Member States, such as Hungary or Poland, have been going on for several years now, and the EU institutions have been applying different measures to tackle these developments.

This blog series will help you better understand both the nature of such a crisis and how it is dealt with at the EU level through the presentation of basic information in plain, straightforward language.

For the purpose of this blog series, a rule of law crisis will be understood as a situation when essential elements of the rule of law, such as the separation of powers or the independence of the judiciary, are being undermined in an EU Member State.[5]

In September, for four consecutive Wednesdays, you can find out:

1. Why a rule of law crisis in a Member State matters for the EU (9th September)

2. What the EU institutions can do to prevent or tackle a rule of law crisis in a Member State (16th September)

3. What the Court of Justice of the EU has adjudicated so far in its judgments regarding a rule of law crisis in a Member State (23rd September)

4. What real-world changes have followed so far from the judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU relating to a Member State’s rule of law crisis (30th September).

Tune in for September with the rule of law at the EU level!

[1] We would like to thank Julia Prummer for her helpful remarks to the previous version of this introductory post, as well as to Muhammad Saad Siddiqui for the linguistic revision of the text.

[2] Officially known as the “Multiannual Financial Framework” (MFF).

[3] Officially known as the “Next Generation EU” (NGEU) instrument.

[4] See Special meeting of the European Council (17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 July 2020) – Conclusions, EUCO 10/20, Annex I.23, p. 16, available at https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/45109/210720-euco-final-conclusions-en.pdf.

[5] Cf. a more complex definition of the process known as “rule of law backsliding” in: Laurent Pech, Kim Lane Scheppele, Illiberalism within: Rule of Law Backsliding in the EU, Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies 2017, Vol 19, p. 10.