Article by MCEL member Guido Bellenghi published in the European Journal of Risk Regulation

The article 'Neither Normalcy nor Crisis: The Quest for a Definition of Emergency under EU Constitutional Law' by MCEL member Guido Bellenghi has been published in the European Journal of Risk Regulation. It investigates the extent to which it is possible to identify one conceptually coherent definition of emergency stemming from the provisions of emergency law included in the EU Treaties.

Increased reliance on ‘emergency’ as a normative justification for the adoption of legal acts by the European Union and its Member States raises the question as to what constitutes an emergency under EU law. The contribution explores the meaning of the notion of ‘emergency’, as opposed to ‘normalcy’ and ‘crisis’, from a European constitutional perspective. It identifies recurrent definitional patterns across EU Member States’ constitutional laws and ECHR law, and tests such patterns against the definitional framework included in the EU Treaties. The article argues that the Treaties are not informed by one conceptually coherent definition of emergency and that this risks casting doubt on the constitutional legitimacy of emergency responses by the Union and its Member States.

The full paper is available open access here.