The European Court of Justice rulings rarely get a big media coverage, but the two recent judgments have come to be seen as yet another piece of the European migration jigsaw puzzle. Less known to the wider public than the Commission or the Council, the Luxembourg based Court has an important bearing on the EU […]
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On Saturday 25 March, the heads of state and EU governments gathered in Rome for the celebration of the Treaty of 1957. This celebration took place at a moment when, for the first time since the launch of the project of European integration, disintegration forces seem to prevail over the construction of ‘an ever closer […]
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18 March marked the one-year anniversary of the controversial EU-Turkey migration deal. The deal was designed to deliver an immediate result to the EU to stop the flow of migrants and serve domestic agendas. Turkey would take back or keep almost all the refugees and, in return, the EU would deliver the long-promised – but […]
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One year after the EU-Turkey statement on migration entered into force, we have to reiterate our strong criticism against this deal. The past year has shown that our concerns about the deal were legitimate. The situation of refugees has not improved and instead thousands of migrants, including many children, are now stranded on a few […]
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In an attempt to point out the culprit in the unprecedented diplomatic crisis between Turkey and European Member States the blame game is on between the two sides. The escalation was an accident waiting to happen, and still, so far no one has pulled the plug on the accession negotiations. Some are clinging to the […]
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Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Hugo Chávez, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Jarosław Kaczyński. What do those people have in common? At one time or another they have all been deemed populists. But does a notion that puts such a diverse group of people under one roof really tell us anything about politics? Populism is probably […]
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The election in the Netherlands will be the first in a series of European elections in 2017. But while expectations are running high and concerns are growing for good reasons, the Dutch election is not expected to be a game-changer in European politics. While Geert Wilders’s populist, anti-immigration and anti-EU Freedom Party (PVV) had been […]
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Last week the House of Lords debated the Brexit Bill as currently proposed by the British Government and sent it back to House of Commons demanding it be amended to assure the rights of EU nationals living in the UK within three months of triggering Article 50. While I applaud the Lords for doing the […]
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It appears that the EU’s solution to its current directionless and delegitimised state is a multi-speed Europe. It is ironic that the 27-nation bloc prepares to mark 60 years since its founding treaty by accepting that an ‘ever closer union’ is officially no longer on the table. Some will argue that the big four which […]
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The massive arrival of refugees and migrants in 2015 and 2016 stretched the capacities of the EU’s structural and legal framework in the field of asylum and migration to its limits, laying bare the deficiencies of supranational decision making. Faced with a large number of people crossing the EU borders the EU institutions and Member […]
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