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Tagged: Rule of Law

Breaking Bias: Training Judges to Challenge Gender Stereotypes in Courts

By Beate Streicher. As part of her re:constitution project, Beate Streicher investigated the impact of stereotypes related to gender identity and expression, sex characteristics and sexual orientation on judicial proceedings and decisions and identified key challenges and good practices related to judicial training on this topic. To provide practical recommendations, she examined the guidance of international monitoring bodies, responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Istanbul Convention, combined with insights from elite interviews with eight experts (six identifying as female and two as male) involved in Council of Europe (CoE) cooperation projects dealing with the topic and the respective courses from the Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) Programme, including the HELP course on WAJ, violence against women and gender equality and gender mainstreaming.

“The Internet has fascinated me for as long as I can remember” – 5in10 with Valentina Golunova

Valentina Golunova is an Assistant Professor in Digital Democracy at Maastricht University. Her research lies at the intersection of platform regulation and fundamental rights. Valentina’s PhD thesis addressed the interplay between algorithmic content moderation, the regulation of digital services in the EU, and freedom of expression online. At the moment, Valentina is pursuing research projects on the legal approaches to countering disinformation and strategic litigation in the field of digital rights.

“I have made some unconventional decisions that brought me many pleasant surprises” – 5in10 with Ezgi Özlü

Ezgi Özlü is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Strasbourg and a re:constitution fellow of 2024/2025. She holds a PhD from the University of Strasbourg, where her research focused on how procedural costs affect the right of individual application before the European Court of Human Rights. Having published in three languages, Ezgi’s research interests encompass issues related to access to justice, including legal aid, procedural costs, admissibility requirements, and reparations. She is also focused on topics surrounding the legal profession, such as legal mobilisation, legal ethics, and litigation funding, as well as broader procedural aspects of international adjudication.

EU Values and the EU’s Rule of Law Action: What Place for Academic Freedom?

By Olga Ceran. Academic freedom, enshrined in Article 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR), has not been discussed extensively in the EU legal literature. What brought it into the spotlight of EU law was the democratic backsliding in Hungary. The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the so-called Lex CEU case, concerning the amendment to the Hungarian Higher Education Act, was the first judicial pronouncement on academic freedom in EU law. These developments confirm in practice what has already been pointed out in the literature: rule of law, democracy, and academic freedom are intertwined. Nevertheless, what this means for EU action remains underexplored. While the EU’s toolbox for the protection of democracy and the rule of law has grown in recent years and has been widely discussed, academic freedom is not explicitly a part thereof and there is no specific instrument for its protection.

Bridging Brexit and the Values Crisis: From Constitutional Resistance to Deliberation?

By Oliver Garner. It may have seemed that the EU’s “Rule of Law crisis” was finally being resolved as 2023 commenced. For the first time since 2015, action by the EU institutions induced both Hungary and Poland to adopt legislation on the organisation of their judiciaries. The decisive factor appears to have been the use of financial pressure through the withholding of EU funds. Nevertheless, problems on a number of fronts suggest that this will not be the silver bullet to solve the values crisis.

Copyright as a Rule of Law Challenge

By Viktoria Kraetzig. The copyright/free speech conflict is inherent in copyright law: copyright grants its owners a limited monopoly on a work, which is also a communication content. If third parties copy the work, they might infringe copyright while invoking their fundamental right of free speech. The conflict arises because free speech doctrine does not distinguish whether someone speaks with own or other people’s words, whether something has been said for the first, second or hundredth time: speaking is speaking. And so is copying.

Elections, Rule of Law and Democracy in Greece

By Taygeti Michalakea. In the 2023 elections, Greece’s ‘New Democracy’ party won a second term with 40.5% of the vote, while the opposition Syriza received only 17.8%. Smaller far-right parties also gained seats, raising concerns about the rule of law. Issues such as weakened independent institutions, lack of media freedom, widespread surveillance, and political interference in the judiciary are contributing to this decline. This text explores how these factors are undermining democracy and eroding fundamental freedoms in Greece.

Refugee and Asylum Seeker Rights in Europe: Gendered Crimmigration Experiences in the Dutch and Spanish Cases

By Colleen Boland. Europe faces increasing patterns of crimmigration, or the merging of criminal and migration law, discourse and practices. Refugees and asylum seekers are conflated with more general migrant populations, and are likewise subjected to these phenomena as well. This article asks how refugee or asylum seeker women experience or negotiate crimmigration rhetoric, policies and practices, particularly in light of the EU fundamental rights to asylum and non-discrimination.

An Essay on Rule-of-Law Culture and Constitutional Resilience

By Théo Fournier. This essay argues that rule-of-law culture could be an avenue of research to address the issue of constitutional resilience of liberal democratic regimes, i.e. the capacity of liberal constitution to resist the passage of time and to remain legitimate in the eyes of the citizenry.

Taking Rights Consciousness Seriously: A Rights-Based Approach to Promoting Rule of Law Culture in the EU

By Catherine Warin. This article argues that enhancing rights consciousness across societies in Europe can help make individual rights a reality and strengthen individual and collective confidence in the EU’s legal system. The author gives a brief reminder of the nature, function and value of rights in the EU legal system and discusses rights consciousness as a precondition for rights effectiveness.