Search Results for: EU reform treaty

When Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine in February, the international community responded with “unprecedented” and “severe” sanctions against Russia. Their expansive scale essentially leads to Russia’s economic and even political isolation. The purpose of the sanctions is clear: to punish Putin’s regime for the violation of international law and stop its military aggression against [...]

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) rejected Poland and Hungary’s challenge Wednesday of the EU budget’s conditionality mechanism for disbursement of funding to the EU Member States, clearing the way for the European Commission (EC) to withhold payments to the two nations. The EU budget’s conditionality mechanism regulation permits the European Council to suspend payments from [...]

In the aftermath of mass protests that swept major cities across Kazakhstan last month, resulting in hundreds of casualties and ultimately the deployment of Russian and allied troops to restore order, a law professor from Nazarbayev University explains what happened, and what we can expect for the Central Asian nation going forward. How did the [...]

The European Commission (“the Commission”) began infringement procedures against Poland Wednesday in light of recent judgments from the country’s Constitutional Tribunal undermining EU law. The Commission considers these judgments to be in “breach of the general principles of autonomy, primacy, effectiveness and uniform application of Union law and the binding effect of rulings of the [...]

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has found that Poland’s Disciplinary Chamber of the Supreme Court acted undemocratically by appointing judges who are not sufficiently neutral, invalidating a Polish court decision. Judge Waldemar Zurek had been transferred from the second-instance division to the first-instance division after he publicly criticized the government’s judicial reforms—an ostensible demotion. [...]

Poland breached EU law by creating a disciplinary chamber for its judges at the Supreme Court of Poland, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on Thursday. The ECJ held that establishing the disciplinary chamber did not “provide all the guarantees of impartiality and independence, and, in particular, is not protected from the direct or [...]

Temporary injunction measures imposed by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) against the country’s controversial judicial reforms are unconstitutional, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled on Wednesday. The country’s President Andrzej Duda signed controversial legislation in February of 2020 that barred judges from questioning judicial appointments made by the President and forbade them from engaging in political [...]

The US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) imposed a series of sanctions on three Bulgarian individuals and sixty-four companies for their extensive role in endemic grand corruption in Bulgaria on 2 June 2021. This is the largest corruption-related targeting to date under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. The sanctions [...]

China has been embroiled in numerous controversies since the onset of 2020. It has received significant flack worldwide as a result of a failure to report to the World Health Organization about the existence and spread of the novel COVID-19, as well as for engaging in a tense diplomatic and military stand-off with its neighboring [...]

Ever since winning the general election of Poland in 2015, the Polish government led by the Law and Justice Party (PiS), has continuously pushed the country to adopt a series of judicial reforms supposedly to drive out the last strands of communism from the judicial set-up. These reforms, however, have been highly controversial in that [...]