The EU Rights Revolution: Adversarial Legalism and European Integration

Where national tax legislation comes within the scope of EU law, it must be compatible with the principle of the rights of the defence, as developed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its case law and found in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The rights of the defence proclaimed by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is also applicable in tax matters when a tax dispute involves a criminal charge. For the European taxpayer it may not be clear if and when the principle of the rights of the defence can be invoked or how the rights of the defence in EU law and the rights of the defence of the ECHR influence domestic tax proceedings. Broadly speaking, customs duties, harmonized indirect taxes and to some extent direct taxes fall under the EU rights of the defence, while the ECHR applies to tax matters in which punitive measures occur or criminal prosecution takes place.

Metamorphosis? The Role of Article 47 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in Cases Concerning National Remedies and Procedures Under Directive 93/13/EEC

Problem setting. The article is devoted to detection of the legal nature of the relationships between EU Member States’ domestic law and newly-created system of patent law governance, which comprises the Council Regulations 1257/2012 on implementing enhanced cooperation in the area of the creation of unitary patent protection and № 1260/2012 on implementing enhanced cooperation in the area of the creation of unitary patent protection with regard to the applicable translation arrangements as well as the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court. The subject of this research are the potential challenges the enforcement of the EU law may pose to the Unified Patent Court, along with enforcing Contracting State’s domestic law and international treaties, binding to the Contracting States as well as potential threats that can emerge after the Unified Patent Court becomes operational, especially the threat of legal fragmentation in terms of patent relationships. Profound analysis of the rules, that set the procedure of using different types of legislation while hearing the patent disputes cases has been made. The legal opinions of the Court of Justice of the European Union concerning the autonomous judicial bodies and their influence on the EU law have been presented. Potential threats to the EU legal system’s integrity and possible ways of deterring them have been outlined. Comparisons between recent and previous legal problems concerning the field of the EU law integrity have been made. The main arguments of the Court of Justice of the European Union have been studied and the most durable ones have been stressed as the milestones of the future Unified Patent Court legal practice. Conclusions about the importance of domestic and EU law correlation in light of patent legal sphere have been made. The drawbacks of current EU legislation and the need for the Court of Justice of the European Union to reconsider its positions have been mentioned. Analysis of recent researches and publications. The problems of compiling EU rights and national rights of EU member states in the context of their use by EU institutions, as well as other bodies, in particular the ECHR, as well as the question of fragmentation of patent law, were raised by the following EU researchers: Kristof Krenn, Giuseppe Martinico, Jorg Polakiewicz, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Steve Peers, Douwe de Lange, Tatiana Komarova. Purpose of the research is to conduct a profound analysis of the problem concerning the use of EU law and other legal sources by the Unified Patent Court during its future legal practice and to study the bonds between the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Unified Patent Court and Contracting Member States and their role in the creation of the new legal framework. Article’s main body. The analytics of the EU patent law harmonization has been an object of attention of many researchers so far. For instance, Reto M. Hilty and the collective of authors, who studied the problem of enforcement of law, that forms the so-called «patent package», explicitly paid their attention to the question of jurisprudence fragmentation, the point of which is that as soon as the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court comes into force, several judicial bodies will cover the territory of the Contracting Member States with their jurisdiction simultaneously. Apart from the national courts, that will deal with the patents, issued by the domestic authorities, the following bodies will execute their functions: the Unified Patent Court on cases concerning the European patent with unitary effect, the Court of Justice of the European Union by issuing its preliminary opinions on the compatibility of the Unified Patent Court’s actions with the EU law and the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office by deciding on the administrative lawsuits. The problem of jurisprudence fragmentation entails a vast amount of problems, the answer to which can only be given by means of judicial practice. If we turn our view towards Article 7 of the Council Regulation № 1257/2012, we will notice that this article gives the European patent with unitary effect the meaning of property, that should be equally recognized throughout all the Contracting Member States. This aspect leads to an important conclusion, that will be discussed later in this paper. Conclusions and prospects for the development. To sum this up, it’s worth noting, that the beginning of the Unified Patent Court’s functioning, as well as the moment when the legislation, created by means of enhanced cooperation mechanism, comes into force, will certainly become a remarkable event both to the EU institutions and the Unified Patent Court, since it has the potential to become a strong incentive to reconsideration of current approaches to the cooperation between the EU and international judicial bodies.

This chapter begins by considering the relationship between the Member States, the EU and the relevant instruments of international law. The disparate systems under which labour standards have developed impose conflicting obligations on EU Member States in certain respects. The varying interpretations given to the rights to freedom of association and collective action within the EU and international legal orders are used to illustrate such conflict. The chapter assesses the impact that an increasingly formal relationship between EU and international law is likely to have on EU law’s supremacy. In conclusion, the authors question whether the CFR, which consolidates the EU and international law regimes, also has the capacity to reconcile the differing labour standards that have evolved.

This chapter investigates the notion of EU rights, starting with a glance at the historical development of rights. This constitutes the starting point for discussions on the relationship between rights and judicial protection, on the differences between rights and interests, as well as on the basic characteristics and determination of EU rights. It argues that the EU model can bear similarities to certain aspects of established Member State models and can unite various elements from different national concepts. Insights into the national concepts are a starting point. However, an exploration of the concept of EU rights must go beyond this and should lead to an autonomous understanding. Apart from that, the significance of the national systems in the development of a concept of EU rights is limited to them being a mechanism of implementation that is subordinated to EU law.

European environmental governance has radically transformed over the past two decades. While traditionally enforcement of environmental law has been the responsibility of public authorities (public authorities of the EU Member States, themselves policed by the European Commission), this paradigm has now taken a democratic turn. Led by changes in international environmental law and in particular the UNECE Aarhus Convention (UNECE, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Convention (1998). Convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (the Aarhus Convention), signed on June 25, 1998.), EU law now gives important legal rights to members of the public and environmental non-governmental organisations (“ENGOs”) to become involved in environmental governance, by means of accessing environmental information, participating in environmental decision-making and bringing legal proceedings. While doctrinal legal and regulatory scholarship on this embrace of “bottom-up” private environmental governance is now substantial, there has been relatively little quantitative research in the field. This article represents a first step in mapping this evolution of environmental governance laws in the EU. We employ a leximetrics methodology, coding over 6000 environmental governance laws from three levels of legal sources (international, EU and national), to provide the first systematic data showing the transformation of European environmental governance regimes. We develop the Nature Governance Index (“NGI”) to measure how the enforcement tools deployed in international, EU and national law have changed over time, from the birth of the EU’s flagship nature conservation law, the 1992 Habitats Directive (Directive 92/43/EEC). At the national level, we focus on three EU Member States (France, Ireland and the Netherlands) to enable a fine-grained measurement of the changes in national nature governance laws over time. This article introduces our unique datasets and the NGI, describes the process used to collect the datasets and its limitations, and compares the evolution in laws at the international, EU and national levels over the 23-year period from 1992–2015. Our findings provide strong empirical confirmation of the democratic turn in European environmental governance, while revealing the significant divergences between legal systems that remain absent express harmonisation of the Aarhus Convention’s principles in EU law. Our data also set the foundations for future quantitative legal research, enabling deeper analysis of the relationships between the different levels of multilevel environmental governance.

DISPUTE BETWEEN THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION AND THE GOVERNMENTS OF MEMBER STATES OVER THE MODEL FOR THE SYSTEM REFORM OF THE ECONOMIC AND MONETARY UNION IN THE YEARS 2010-2023 The primary research objective of the article is to analyze the System Reform of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) from 2010 to 2023 from the perspective of the dispute between the European Commission and the governments of Member States over the model of this reform. The author formulated two research hypotheses. The first one is based on the assumption that the implementation of the reform faced numerous difficulties and barriers resulting from the negative attitudes of the governments of some Eurozone member states towards the implementation of selected projects of the European Commission, but also from the accumulation of several international crises that the European Union was facing at the time. These were the migration crisis in 2015-2016 and then from 2022, the pandemic crisis in 2020-2021 and the geopolitical crisis caused by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine from 2022. The second hypothesis is that the main axis of disagreement between the Commission and the governments of Member States was the limits of financial solidarity and the target System Model of the EMU. Following this, the author formulated four research questions: (1) On which issues did the positions of the European Commission and the Eurozone Summit converge and on which issues did they diverge, and why? (2) To what extent did disagreements between Member State governments over the limits of financial solidarity and the target integration model of the EMU determine the direction of System Reform? (3) How important were the aforementioned international crises for the fate of the reform? (4) What were the main achievements and failures of the EMU System Reform?

The EU General Principle of Effectiveness and Judicial Federalism in the EU: Theorising EU Judicial Protection from a Federalist Perspective

Introduction. The article considers one of the most important issues of constitutionalization of EU law, namely the processes of internal structuring of the constitutional law of this supranational entity. The author substantiates the opinion that together with the expansion of the EU's competence and the strengthening of the processes of interstate integration within the framework of the EU constitutional law, the institution of European governance is gradually crystallizing. In the system of constitutional law of the EU, this institution occupies a place similar to that in national legal systems occupies the institution of the form of government. The Institute of European Governance reflects the modus operandi (from the Latin "method of action") of the EU as a supranational entity, which has significant specifics in terms of institutional and functional organization and mechanism for developing and implementing government decisions. The process of forming European governance and filling it with specific content takes place within the general process of "setting political and legal standards", based on the latest advances in political and legal theory and practice and reflecting the highest requirements for quality governance and EU rights and freedoms. Summary of the main research results. Today the European Union has accumulated significant experience in reforming and improving public administration and public service, although these areas are not directly regulated by the acquis communautaire. Therefore, today the acquisition in the field of public administration and public service organization mainly takes the form of "soft law" and "soft standards" - White Papers and communications of the European Commission, recommendations of conferences of ministers responsible for public administration and / or heads of departments of public services etc. A systematic analysis of EU legislation suggests that the most significant distinguishing features of European governance are that it is based on the principles of good governance, multi-level (including network) governance, the rule of law and respect for human rights. Initially, European governance had the character of an intersectoral principle that determined the order of organization and activities of public authorities within the EU in all areas of the functioning of public administration, but after the adoption of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and giving it the force of the founding treaties of the EU (i.e., giving it essentially the status an integral part of the unwritten constitution of the EU), where one of the fundamental human rights is the right to proper governance, this principle is actually brought to the level of the foundations of the constitutional law of the EU. Conclusions. The conclusion is substantiated that European governance from the point of view of the constitutional law of the EU means good, multi-level, subordinate to the law and “respectful of human rights” governance. The transformation of the concept of European governance into the EU legal system is a vivid example of the constitutionalization of this supranational entity. In the system of constitutional law of the EU, European governance as a political and legal concept has become a fundamental constitutional principle, one of the foundations of the constitutional order of the EU. Ukraine's course towards European integration leads to the need for full implementation of the requirements of European governance in political and legal practice and national legislation.

The search for a new democratic order in Europe after World War II was marked by the creation of a system of human rights protection based on the rule of law and a guarantee for every person under their jurisdiction human rights and fundamental freedoms. A system based on the effective cooperation of Member States of the international community should, in practice, become the one that determines the capacity of a particular entity, a particular institution, working alone or in collaboration with others. In the scientific literature, the idea of human rights, reflected in studies of European state building and public administration, has been developed into a theoretical concept that has become the basis of a social institute of human rights legitimized as a result of institutional processes at all levels of global and European governance. Given the current geopolitical changes, the migration crisis, environmental problems, armed conflicts and terrorist attacks, human rights are constantly being violated; public authorities, both national and integrational, face the challenge of finding effective mechanisms for ensuring the survival and development of human society. That is why the purpose of the article is to identify the particularities of the functioning of the EU's institutional human rights protection system in the context of finding an effective model of the human rights protection system. The EU's main institution is the Council of Europe, which has proven itself to be the most effective object of the system during its existence. The tasks of the countries which have acceded to the Council of Europe indicate the need to create a common ground for understanding the rule of law, as well as freedom and human rights. In this context, it should be emphasized that the effectiveness of the institutional system created to protect human rights is linked to certain standards, including the decision-making process legally enshrined in both international and national law. The Council of Europe and its Member States, in the interests of respect for and protection of liberties and human rights, should make every effort to ensure that all mechanisms, including political monitoring and control by the European Court of Human Rights, are used. It is argued that the effectiveness of human rights protection systems in the EU depends largely on the effectiveness of the procedures for implementing and monitoring the implementation of commitments made by individual countries. Attention is drawn to the fact that no state can ignore the values that are fundamental to the democratic identity of the entire international community, which they are bound to uphold. This also applies to Ukraine, which has ratified the European Convention on Human Rights and has to implement its requirements in domestic law. The main instruments and mechanisms of the European Union are being considered to help address human rights issues in the Member States. The functions of the main actors in the human rights protection system, in particular the European Court of Human Rights, are analyzed. An important condition for the effective functioning of the system is interinstitutional cooperation betweenSecretary General of the Council of Europe, Commissioner for Human Rights and the Tribunal of the European Court of Human Rights. It has been identified that one of the standard sets is to achieve a high level of human rights protection,which depends on the effectivenessof the procedures for fulfilling and controlling the commitments undertaken by member states of the Council of Europe. The effectiveness of the control procedure and the specific control mechanism increases only when a complaint is submitted to a competent, independent body, preferably a law enforcement one. This depends on the legal education of the population, which should be aware of the choice of instruments and mechanisms to protect their rights in a particular situation. Similarly, the issues of regulation of the sphere of official competence, which enable them to perform their function without any external pressure, also need legal justification. The choice of specific action methods by the state to ensure the protection of human rights, remains free, however, as a rule, it is limited and determined by the purpose or result set out in aparticular international agreement. The current activity of the Council of Europe proves that one of the main areas of its work is the creation of constitutional standards oriented towards the democratic development of Member States' political systems based on the values associated with freedom and human rights, which form its fundamental basis. These standards are transposed into the internal legal systems of the Member States. Thus, the theoretical foundations that characterize the human rights protection system indicate that in the process of creating human rights standards, the Council of Europe's «soft instruments», including, above all, recommendations, occupy an extremely important place. A very important incentive for Member States to fulfill their obligations before the Council of Europe is not only the quality of its specific monitoring and control procedures, but also the fact that the European Union itself clearly states that a country which does not comply with the principles and standards of the CoE does not have a chance of EU membership. It is noted that, regardless of levels, the process of European integration is based on broadening the sphere of democratic values and standards in order to better protect human rights and ensure the successful development of European communities. Respect for human rights is first and foremost the task of national authorities. This also applies to Ukraine which is seeking to become a full member of the EU.

Rights as well as democracy play a crucial role in the legitimacy of the EU and constitutional patriotism has been influential in attempting to link them together. The article seeks to engage in a critique of constitutional patriotism on two fronts. First, it distinguishes between the various types of right that exist within EU law – Community, citizenship and fundamental – and then analyses the place of these rights within various political models of the EU ranging from nationalism to republicanism. It argues that constitutional patriotism does not enjoy a monopoly on rights discourse in the EU: most models of the EU see a place for rights; it is just that the type of right supported varies. Secondly, advocates of constitutional patriotism argue that EU rights generate European identity. The article questions the extent to which this is the case, arguing that identity potential varies considerably according to the type of EU right concerned.

The ‘access to justice’ within the meaning of the Treaty of Lisbon and the pertinent CJEU jurisprudence is primarily seen as access to the EU judicial system, i.e. to the EU Member States’ national courts applying the EU Law or/and the CJEU. The concept of ‘access to justice’ is therefore developing such premises of the Van Gend en Loos judgment as direct effect, vigilance of the EU individual, and the symbiotic relationship between the CJEU and national courts via the preliminary reference procedure. This work aims to explore the development of two basic ideas of Van Gend en Loos, i.e. granting directly enforceable EU rights to individuals and authorizing national courts to protect those rights, in light of the ‘access to justice’ concept within the meaning of the Lisbon Treaty – considering their importance for the realization of EU individuals’ substantive rights and uncertainty surrounding this issue. The paper develops a critique of the theory of justice in EU Law, analyzing if and how the Van Gend en Loos premises influenced the role of individuals making an attempt to claim their EU rights and the role of the EU courts responsible for the enforcement of ‘access to justice’ in the European Union. The claim of this paper is that the new concept of ‘access to justice’ brought by the Lisbon Treaty may be seen as the further development of the Van Gend ‘federalizing effect’ for greater integration through law and an enhanced protection of the individual within the EU multilevel system of Human Rights protection.

INTRODUCTION The relationship between integration policies and EU migration law has taken unprecedented forms in the last decade of European integration. During the negotiations over the first pieces of EU secondary legislation covering the conditions of entry and residence of third-country nationals (TCNs) in the EU in the early 2000s, a new approach to integration made its way into Directives 2003/109 on the status of third-country nationals who are long-term residents and 2003/86 on the right to family reunification. This approach makes use of integration policies as criteria for access to EU rights and freedoms by TCNs. Integration functions as a legal requirement or migration control tool over socio-economic inclusion, security of residence, and family reunification. The academic literature has qualified this mutation as a ‘paradigm shift ‘ from past normative approaches to integration developed since the 1970s in EU law and policy. Indeed, integration policies used to mainly focus on the facilitation of mobility through non-discrimination, respect for family life and security of residence. Lately, however, integration has become a new ground for exclusion of foreigners in the EU's management of human mobility and identity. Two novel formulations of this control-oriented approach to integration can now be found in Directives 2003/109 and 2003/86, i.e. ‘integration conditions’ and ‘integration measures’. Integration conditions are used in Article 5 Directive 2003/109 for the acquisition of long-term resident status, while integration measures are present in Article 15(3) Directive 2003/109 (which specifies the conditions for residence in a second Member State), and Article 7(2) Directive 2003/86 (stipulating the requirements for the exercise of the right to family reunification). The scholarly debate has engaged with the meaning and differences between the scope of integration ‘conditions’ and ‘measures’ in the Directives and EU immigration law more generally. It has also paid attention to the legality of EU Member States’ integration policies implementing them into their respective legal systems through the use of mandatory integration programmes, tests/exams and contracts. A key controversy in scholarly and policy debates has been the extent to which EU Member States could lawfully apply obligatory civic integration programmes conditioning access and/ maintenance of EU rights by TCNs to passing an exam on knowledge of the receiving country's language and ‘societal values’.

Existing typologies of the European administrative space locate decision‐making powers with the European Commission, member state governments, and EU and national agencies, sometimes aided through regulatory networks. This article argues that those typologies are incomplete because they do not take into account the existence of transnational executive bodies. These are public authorities that are responsible for administering and implementing EU policies across multiple member states, that are part of neither domestic nor EU institutions and whose decisions are legally binding. They represent a potentially highly prevalent form of governance in a previously uncharted area of the European administrative space. We document their workings by presenting a case study of the Rhine‐Alpine Corridor organization, a transnational executive body implementing parts of the EU rail freight policy.

The Lisbon Treaties constitute a new stage in the process of European integration. They promote an open society in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen. The functioning of the EU shall be founded on representative democracy, which includes that right of every citizen “to participate in the democratic life of the Union”. This individual right to participate is further concretized by the right to participate in elections to the European Parliament (Articles 22(2) and 223 TFEU), the right to participate in a citizen initiative (Article 11(4) TEU), the right to submit petitions to the European Parliament (Articles (24(2) and 227 TFEU, the right to submit complaints to the European Ombudsman (Articles 24(2) and 228 TFEU), the right to have access to documents held by EU institutions (Article 15 TFEU) and the right to write to any EU institution or body and obtain an answer (Article 24(4) TFEU). The present contribution will limit itself to examining how the right of participation of citizens in environmental decision-making was put into practice by EU institutions and bodies at EU level and, via secondary EU law, at the level of the Member States. After a description of the different provisions of primary law – the TEU and the TFEU – (1) and of secondary EU law (2), the application of the right to participate at EU level (3) and in EU legislation regarding the participation in environmental decision-making at national level will be examined (4). Some concluding remarks will round up the contribution (5). PRIMARY EU LAW The EU Treaties do not contain specific provisions as regards the rights of citizens to participate in environmental decision-making. As a general obligation, apart from the provisions mentioned above, Article 11(2) TEU is to be mentioned, which obliges the EU institutions to maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue with representative associations and civil society. Article 11(3) TEU obliges the Commission to “carry out broad consultation with parties concerned in order to ensure that the Union's actions are coherent and transparent”. The objective of the open and regular dialogue is clarified in Article 15(1) TFEU, which asks the Union institutions and bodies to conduct their work as openly as possible, “(I)n order to promote good governance and ensure the participation of civil society”.