Rule of Law Backsliding in the EU: What Is It and What Must Be Done About It? | 3 April 2019
Laurent Pech is Professor of European Law, Jean Monnet Chair of European Public Law (2014-17) and Head of the Law and Politics Department at Middlesex University London. Justine Stefanelli is the Maurice Wohl Senior Research Fellow in European Law at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law
In this webinar, Prof. Laurent Pech addresses the issue of ‘rule of law backsliding’ in Europe, which is the process through which elected public authorities deliberately implement blueprints designed to systematically weaken, capture and/or annihilate internal checks on power. This process facilitates the establishment of de facto electoral autocracies and one-party states. In the EU, Poland and Hungary have raised particular concerns in this respect and they are now both subject to Article 7(1) TEU proceedings.
Rule of law backsliding is therefore no longer a theoretical concern for the EU. It is a clear and present danger, which risks fatally undermining a common legal framework which the European Court of Justice has described as ‘a structured network of principles, rules and mutually interdependent legal relations linking the EU and its Member States, and its Member States with each other’. Before presenting possible solutions regarding the way forward, Pech assesses the EU institutions’ answers (or non-answers) to this problem.
