The European Council’s Guidelines for the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice 2020: Subverting the ‘Lisbonisation’ of Justice and Home Affairs? CEPS Essay No. 13, 14 July 2014

In its Conclusions of 26-27 June 2014, the European Council has adopted the new “Strategic Guidelines for Legislative and Operational Planning for the coming years within the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ)”. These Guidelines reveal a pre-Lisbon Treaty mindset among the EU member states and the Justice and Home Affairs Council. This essay argues that the Guidelines are mainly driven by the interests and agendas of national Ministries of Interior and Justice and are only “strategic” to the extent that they aim at first, re-injecting ‘intergovernmentalism’ or bringing back the old EU Third Pillar ways of working to the new EU institutional setting of the AFSJ and second, at sidelining the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and rule of law in the AFSJ. The paper argues that the European Council Guidelines seek to prevent the advances in Justice and Home Affairs cooperation as envisaged in the Treaty of Lisbon, particularly its emphasis on supranational democratic, legal and judicial accountability. As a consequence of this move to ‘de-Lisbonise’ JHA cooperation, fundamental rights and rule of law-related initiatives will be neglected and the interest of the individual will be displaced from the centre of gravity in the coming AFSJ 2020 policy agenda.

The European Court of Justice blocks the EU’s accession to the ECHR. CEPS Commentary, 8 January 2015

The goal of accession to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) is to place the EU under the external oversight of the specialised court in Strasbourg. But in its Opinion of 18 December 2014 the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice ruled that the draft accession agreement is not compatible with the EU treaties. In this commentary the authors argue that this would force EU member states to renegotiate the terms of accession to the ECHR. But meeting the demands made by the Court of Justice will prove to be very difficult.

Gender Equality in the Case Law of the European Court of Justice. IES WORKING PAPER 2/2009

The principle of gender equality forms a part of the EU’s social policy and serves equally men and women. So far, fourteen directives concerning gender equality have been adopted in the EU, with the New Equal Treatment Directive as the latest one. The EU has developed different models to promote gender equality: equal treatment, positive action and most recently gender mainstreaming. The equal treatment model is primarily concerned with formal equality and it unfortunately prevails in the ECJ’s rulings. Indeed, this paper argues that so far, the ECJ has not managed to develop a firm and consistent case law on gender equality, nor to stretch it coherently to positive action and gender mainstreaming. It seems that in spite of some progress in promoting the position of women, the ECJ’s case law has recently taken a step backwards with its conservative judgments in e.g. the Cadman case. Overall, this paper aims at summing up and evaluating the most important cases of the ECJ on gender equality.