Latest blog articles

  • About 100 British officials will arrive in Brussels today to start the mammoth negotiations on the future relationship between the EU and the UK. The two sides are poles apart. The UK wants regulatory detachment from the EU while the EU insists or regulatory alignment.

  • The very recent ruling of the CJEU in DK (C-653/19 PPU, 28 November 2019) came to verify two quite depressing suspicions about the current status of European criminal law. First, Directive 2016/343 on the presumption of innocence remains an instrument with staggeringly limited applicability...

  • The European Union prides itself for being based on the rule of law. Indeed, the success and longevity of the EU as an integration project can be partly explained by, on the one hand, the willingness of Member States to abide by the obligations that stem from the Treaties and, on the other, the...

  • In response to the (alleged) use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime in the city of Douma, the United Kingdom, United States, and France carried out a number of missile strikes against several government facilities. These strikes clearly violate basic rules of international law.

  • It would have been rather uncomfortable for the Court to rule that the Italian limitation periods for serious VAT-fraud cases should be set aside, wouldn't it? Can Taricco II be, after all, just a temporary (and unstable!) bridge over the troubled waters of the EU’s financial interests, soon to be...

  • A 83-year-old man suffered severe brain damage due to a fall in a bank. The man was brought to a hospital where he died one week later. A medical report then showed that the lack of assistance did not (even partly) contribute to the man’s unfortunate death. Still, the refusal to help had certain...