Reading Time: 4 minutes – All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. – – George Orwell, Animal Farm – Twelve-thousand people in the streets, trying to protect themselves from the heat – and the hate – gathered everywhere, nowhere for them to go. They represent the 0,00026% of the EU’s population and they cannot…
Reading Time: 7 minutes The concept of rule of law frequently makes its appearance in the EU political scene: in many institutional documents, Treaties, political discourse and even in newspapers. Nonetheless, most of the time it remains obscure and undefined, which makes it difficult for people to understand. Thus, the rule of law tends to only be associated with…
Reading Time: 6 minutes The likelihood that the Budapest-born U.S. investor and philanthropist George Soros and the Budapest-centred head of the current Hungarian government Viktor Orban will become best friends is quite small. Quite big will be the satisfaction of the Central European University founded by Soros himself in the face of today´s EU Court of Justice´s judgment which…
Reading Time: 5 minutes The European Commission recently launched a new Pact on Migration and Asylum on September 23rd. The Pact is a mixture of legislative proposals and soft law recommendations with the aim of relaunching a predictable and reliable migration management system. In its terms, it is crucial to rebuild trust between Member States as well as a…
Reading Time: 7 minutes It might seem surprising that Romansh, spoken by only 0.5% of its population, has the status of a national language in Switzerland. Why is a language that is spoken by the 60,000 people who live in the valleys and mountain villages in the canton of Graubünden so important for the Swiss Confederation? And how is…
Reading Time: 5 minutes The Ferragosto week in Italy was very calm as usual, in contrast Belarus was full of tension brought about by the presidential election on 9 August 2020. This year I visited my family in Belarus the week after the election and the things I saw there will always remain in my heart. Upon my return…
Reading Time: 4 minutes The Charter states that scientific research should be “free of constraint” and that academic freedom is to be “respected”. Wishful thinking or the superfluous statement of facts? For sure not the latter: we know that at least one EU Member State adopted a university law de facto chasing a prominent university out of the country….
Reading Time: 5 minutes If one happens to think of similarities between the Swiss city of Fribourg and the Italian city of Bolzano/Bozen – as I do, coming from the former and spending a summer in the latter – one might first think of the mountains which surround the two cities. Or perhaps of the rivers which run through…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Immersed in the context of ‘mature western democracies’, the certainty of universally guaranteed voting rights is one of our society’s most predictable bastions. This thinking takes on a certain meaning from a purely continental perspective: apart from a few, very specific cases of representation of particular territorial interests, European citizens take for granted that they…
Reading Time: 7 minutes In some corners, EU-Europe has the reputation of being nothing more than a playground for business interests.[1] If that was the case, EU law would clearly prioritise the common market over human rights. Does it? Well, let’s examine a test case. In 2003, the EU Court in Luxembourg had to decide whether to give preference…
