The Court of Justice deploys the Rule of Law to pre-empt necessary dialogue and to disqualify substantive arguments of principle originating in other legal orders, frustrating consistent deployment of the principle across the legal orders with far-reaching implications for human rights protection and judicial independence standards. The Rule of Law thus emerges as a trump card making supremacy considerations outweigh human rights and legality guarantees. Such deployment of the Rule of Law ruins the basic coherence of the EU legal system, as the Court does not measure the EU legal system it is entrusted with by the same standards that it applies to the national legal orders, while embracing a multitude of conflicting approaches to the Rule of Law and judicial independence, steeply departing from EU law’s own established principles, as well as ECHR standards in Rule of Law cases. EAW system with the apparent presumption of guilt; questions over structural independence of the ECJ following the ousting of AG Sharpston; 27000 unaccountable deaths in the Mediterranean and counting, ‘instrumentalization’ excuses note to uphold human rights at the Eastern border of the Union, and the legitimation of unlawfully appointed individuals by accepting preliminary questions from them in breach of ECHR law, all emerge as elements of the same puzzle. Such use of the principle is both dangerous and directly opposed to the very essence of European constitutionalism. To discuss these developments, we assembled an expert round-table composed of the following scholars, actively engaged with different aspects of the issue at hand:

Dr. Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova, School of Advanced Studies, University of London

Prof. Gareth Davies, VU University of Amsterdam;

Dr. Sarah Ganty, Yale Law School and Ghent University;

Dr. Barbara Grabowska-Moroz, CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest;

Prof. Dimitry Kochenov, CEU Democracy Institutute, Budapest;

Dr. Michał Ziółkowski, Kozmiński University, Warsaw