This is a recurring event: View all events in the series “ISEL Seminar Series”
Speaker: Prof Dimitry Kochenov, CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest
Chair: Prof Elaine Fahey, City St George’s, University of London
Discussants: Prof Francesca Strumia, City St George’s, University of London, Prof Albena Azmanova, City St George’s, University of London
It is possible to approach the EU's response to the democratic and Rule of Law backsliding over the past ten years from the perspective of the effects of the steps, which supranational institutions took in this context.
While a significant shift of power towards the supranational level is immediately observable, any change to the better at the national level, in the name of which the federal bargain has been altered is more difficult to decipher. It emerges that the autocratic legalism at the national level prompts supranational opportunism, which is ultimately unrelated to solving the proclaimed crises, which such opportunism was aiming to tackle.
The EU is weaker as a result: the supranational shift produced an evolution of EU Rule of Law away from the ideals of justice, legality and human rights protection, resulting in what I frame as 'supremacy Rule of Law', consisting in deploying the Rule of Law largely as supremacy of EU law, whatever its substance or its relation to the values of the Union.
The outcome is helplessness vis-à-vis national-level values abuse, growing impunity and rising death-toll at the borders as well as the diminishing level of human rights protection for the European citizens in the European legal space, prompting further divergence between the substance of EU and ECHR law at the expense of EU citizens and values. Supranational opportunism has further eroded the robustness of EU federalism while reaching none of the stated goals which gave the rise of supremacy Rule of Law the initial push in the first place.
About the speaker
Professor Dimitry Vladimirovich Kochenov (LEGS '02) leads the Rule of Law Workgroup at CEU Democracy Institute and teaches at the Department of Legal Studies.
In 2023 he has been awarded a EUR 1M grant from Stiftung Mercator to establish Clinical Rule of Law work in Budapest, which is his main on-going project. Prof. Kochenov's research focuses on the principles of law in the global context, with a special emphasis on the Rule of Law, citizenship, and the enforcement of EU values.
Outside of CEU Dimitry is Visiting Professor at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome (Faculty of Law). In the Spring semester of 2025 he is also a Visiting Professor and a Fellow at the Centre of Comparative and Public Law at Hong Kong University. In the Spring Semester of 2024 he was also Malyi Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.
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