It is a sign of unconventional times when earnest people wish you a less exciting year 2017 compared to the one that has just, luckily, passed. Starting a new year, a less exciting one then, is an opportunity for reckoning about the past and for charting the plans for the future. For those who care about the project of European integration, these are no easy moments.
We have long praised the liberal values on which modern constitutionalism is built and there to enforce: inviolable and equal human dignity, human rights protection, democracy and the rule of law. These are all the cornerstone values of modern constitutionalism deeply imbued with liberal political ethos in whose absence they either cannot exist or acquire a completely differ …
The EU constitutionalism has been transformed. For the worse. The causes for that are well known. They are the sum of consecutive, unresolved financial, economic, political, humanitarian and security crises. This post is not interested into causal relationship between the crises. It centers instead on their aggregate negative outcome and the possible way ahead.
Some time ago this blog has lent itself as a platform for an intense debate on a systemic rule of law and democracy defiance in several EU Member States, most notably in Hungary. In that context, I contributed a short post on what I then called the de facto failed Slovenian democracy. I described a judicial process against the leader of the opposition, who was accused and co …
The political and legal crisis in Slovenia has escalated further. The opposition leader, the former Prime Minister Janez Janša, was taken to prison on June 20 amid public protests and harsh critique waged by the most prominent Slovenian constitutional lawyers. The crisis is due to have huge impact on the fairness of the election, scheduled for July 13.
Slovenia is heading for a snap election on July 13, 2014, the second in less than three years. However, this time around there is a very high risk that the election is going to take place contrary to the standards anticipated in a liberal constitutional democracy based on the rule of law. The leader of the centre-right opposition, Mr.
For the upcoming European elections, most European parties have nominated candidates for President of the EU Commission. In the Brussels jargon, this issue is called the „Spitzenkandidat process“. How German is this idea? Does is actually make sense in other parliamentary systems or constitutional traditions? The “Spitzenkandidat process”, other than for its German denominatio …
