National Constitutions In European And Global Governance Democracy Rights The Rule Of Law

This two-volume book, published open access, brings together leading scholars of constitutional law from twenty-nine European countries to revisit the role of national constitutions at a time when decision-making has increasingly shifted to the European and transnational level. It offers important insights into three areas. First, it explores how constitutions reflect the transfer of powers from domestic to European and global institutions. Secondly, it revisits substantive constitutional values, such as the protection of constitutional rights, the rule of law, democratic participation and constitutional review, along with constitutional court judgments that tackle the protection of these rights and values in the transnational context, e.g. with regard to the Data Retention Directive, the European Arrest Warrant, the ESM Treaty, and EU and IMF austerity measures. The responsiveness of the ECJ regarding the above rights and values, along with the standard of protection, is also assessed. Thirdly, challenges in the context of global governance in relation to judicial review, democratic control and accountability are examined. On a broader level, the contributors were also invited to reflect on what has increasingly been described as the erosion or ‘twilight’ of constitutionalism, or a shift to a thin version of the rule of law, democracy and judicial review in the context of Europeanisation and globalisation processes. The national reports are complemented by a separately published comparative study, which identifies a number of broader trends and challenges that are shared across several Member States and warrant wider discussion. The research for this publication and the comparative study were carried out within the framework of the ERC-funded project ‘The Role and Future of National Constitutions in European and Global Governance’. The book is aimed at scholars, researchers, judges and legal advisors working on the interface between national constitutional law and EU and transnational law. The extradition cases are also of interest to scholars and practitioners in the field of criminal law. Anneli Albi is Professor of European Law at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. Samo Bardutzky is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

This two-volume book, published open access, brings together leading scholars of constitutional law from twenty-nine European countries to revisit the role of national constitutions at a time when decision-making has increasingly shifted to the European and transnational level. It offers important insights into three areas. First, it explores how constitutions reflect the transfer of powers from domestic to European and global institutions. Secondly, it revisits substantive constitutional values, such as the protection of constitutional rights, the rule of law, democratic participation and constitutional review, along with constitutional court judgments that tackle the protection of these rights and values in the transnational context, e.g. with regard to the Data Retention Directive, the European Arrest Warrant, the ESM Treaty, and EU and IMF austerity measures. The responsiveness of the ECJ regarding the above rights and values, along with the standard of protection, is also assessed. Thirdly, challenges in the context of global governance in relation to judicial review, democratic control and accountability are examined. On a broader level, the contributors were also invited to reflect on what has increasingly been described as the erosion or 'twilight' of constitutionalism, or a shift to a thin version of the rule of law, democracy and judicial review in the context of Europeanisation and globalisation processes. The national reports are complemented by a separately published comparative study, which identifies a number of broader trends and challenges that are shared across several Member States and warrant wider discussion. The research for this publication and the comparative study were carried out within the framework of the ERC-funded project 'The Role and Future of National Constitutions in European and Global Governance'. The book is aimed at scholars, researchers, judges and legal advisors working on the interface between national constitutional law and EU and transnational law. The extradition cases are also of interest to scholars and practitioners in the field of criminal law. Anneli Albi is Professor of European Law at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. Samo Bardutzky is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The idea of the EU as a constitutional order has recently taken on renewed life, as the Court of Justice declared the primacy of EU law not just over national constitutions but also over the international legal order, including the UN Charter. This book explores the nature and character of EU legal and political authority, and the complex analytical and normative questions which the notion of European constitutionalism raises, in both the EU's internal and its external relations. The book culminates in a dialogical epilogue in which the authors' arguments are questioned and challenged by the editor, providing a unique and stimulating approach to the subject. By bringing together leading constitutional theorists of the European Union, this book offers a sharp, challenging and engaging discussion for students and researchers alike.

This volume explores the various strategies, mechanisms and processes that influence rule of law dynamics across borders and the national/international divide, illuminating the diverse paths of influence. It shows to what extent, and how, rule of law dynamics have changed in recent years, especially at the transnational and international levels of government. To explore these interactive dynamics, the volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together the normative perspective of law with the analytical perspective of social sciences. The volume contributes to several fields, including studies of rule of law, law and development, and good governance; democratization; globalization studies; neo-institutionalism and judicial studies; international law, transnational governance and the emerging literature on judicial reforms in authoritarian regimes; and comparative law (Islamic, African, Asian, Latin American legal systems).

This book provides an in-depth guide to researchers and practitioners who are interested in analyzing the evolution of EU law from a national and comparative constitutional law perspective. The volume deals with questions of how EU Member States’ constitutional systems, including the subnational tier, interact with the supranational level. It maps the evolution over time of constitutional strategies in the face of multi-level governance and individuates contextual factors on an empirical basis. The volume includes twelve national reports written by leading experts in constitutional and EU law, and in political science. The countries discussed include the six founding Member States, together with a selection of Member States in which a clear-cut evolution in the national constitutional approach towards the EU can be observed. These include the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom. The latter is included as an “extreme” case in which the change in constitutional strategy over time has resulted in withdrawing from the Union altogether. Taken together, the book assembles the building blocks of an explanatory theory of constitutional strategies in the face of multi-level governance. The volume will be of interest to students and researchers in comparative constitutional law, political science and multidisciplinary EU studies. It will also be a valuable resource for policy-makers.

The existence of interactions between different but overlapping legal systems has always presented challenges to black letter law. This is particularly true of the relationship between international law and domestic law and the relationship between federal law and the laws of individual federation members. Moreover some organisations have created their own supranational constitutional systems: the United Nations Charter is the best known, and is often referred to as the 'World Constitution', but the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg views the European Treaties as a 'Constitutional Charter' for Europe, while the European Court of Human Rights has defined the European Convention on Human Rights as a constitutional instrument of 'European public order'. It is in the dynamic relationship between domestic constitutional laws, EU law, the ECHR and the UN Charter that the most persistent difficulties arise. In this context 'interordinal instability' not only provokes strong academic interest, but also affects what has been called 'governance' or 'global government' and undermines both legal certainty and individual fundamental rights. Different solutions - constitutionalist and pluralist - have been explored, but none of them has received global acceptance. In this book Luis Gordillo analyses the interordinal instabilities which arise at the European level, focusing on three main strands of case law and their implications: Solange, Bosphorus and Kadi. To solve the difficulties caused by this instability Gordillo proposes a form of soft constitutionalism, which he calls 'interordinal constitutionalism', as a means to bring order and stability to global legal governance. The original Spanish thesis on which this book is based was awarded the Nicolás Pérez Serrano Prize by the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, for the best dissertation in constitutional law 2009-2010.

This publication contains the reports presented at the UniDem Seminar in Skopje. Foreign policy unquestionably serves the national interest in the broadest sense but nowadays it is no longer left entirely to discretion of governments. The legal foundation of foreign policy are made up both of rules of international law and rules of domestic law, whilst remaining an under-regulated area of democracy and of the law. The seminar in Skopje was an initiative which permitted an exchange of views on this subject between representatives of different countries.