Blogpost 4/2023 On 13 October 2022, the CJEU (hereinafter: the Court) issued a judgment on religious discrimination in employment. In Case C-344/20 (LF v SCRL), the Court held that neutrality provisions prohibiting workers from manifesting their religious or philosophical beliefs do not constitute direct discrimination, provided that they are applied in a general and undifferentiated way. This ruling is not an anomaly in the Court’s corpus of equality cases concerning Islamic headscarves. However, its significance lies in the Court’s responses to the other questions referred by the French-spea ..read more

Blogpost 2/2023 The President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, declared that ‘European democracy is under attack’ and announced the launch of a reform process following the arrests of four people on 9 December 2022, as a result of an investigation into suspicions of corruption to the benefit of Qatar. Among them, the most prominent name is Eva Kaili, at the time Vice-President of the European Parliament, who has as a result been stripped of her title. Former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Pier Antonio Panzeri is also involved. The problem is that, considering the long-deno ..read more

Blogpost 1/2023 I’ll be honest: I don’t like football. I think it is overcommercialised, involves way too much money and an excessive amount of public resources and the competition on the pitch has precious little to do with athletes trying to outcompete another (I’ve always liked rowing better). With that out of the way, we can now move on to discuss the recent opinion by Advocate General Rantos in Superleague. The facts leading to Superleague are clear and widely known. A number of high-ranking football clubs sought to create their own league, the Superleague. This would allow these founding ..read more

As we are reaching the end of 2022, we would like to present to you the European Law Blog’s top ten most-read blog posts of the year. This list of top ten provides us with the opportunity to celebrate the most popular blog posts, to offer an insight into the topics that have gotten the most attention from our readers this past year, and to thank all the authors who have contributed to our blog. Without further ado, here is our top ten most-read posts of 2022: 10. Convenient, but controversial: Why the European Defence Fund should not be expanded as the Commission becomes ‘geopolitical’ By Jess ..read more

Blogpost 54/2022 How did the ECJ balance the rights to privacy and data protection against transparency of Ultimate Beneficial Owners registries in WM and Sovim SA v Luxembourg Business Registers? While the eyes of the world are on the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the highest referee in the European Union (EU) – the Court of Justice of the EU (ECJ), sitting as the Grand Chamber – ruled in favour of privacy and data protection of the ultimate beneficial owners (UBO) of corporate entities, whose fundamental rights were infringed by one of the provisions of the EU secondary law. In judgment WM and So ..read more

Blogpost 53/2022 On November 9, 2022, after conducting a year-long debate (the debate had been originally launched in February 2020, but then re-launched after the COVID-19 pandemic on October 2021), the European Commission proposed an overhaul of the European Union’s (EU) economic governance framework. If eventually pursued, this will be the third overhaul of the framework since its original adoption 25 years ago. How have these changes affected or will affect the modus operandi of the EU? This post first lays out the existing economic governance framework of the EU before looking at the prop ..read more

Blogpost 52/2022 On 15th July 2021, the Court of Justice (CJEU) delivered its judgment in Grand Chamber case FBF / ACPR, dealing with the impact of soft law within the EU legal order once again. Especially in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, EU institutions and agencies strongly relied on soft instruments, whose nature and effects have been assessed by the CJEU in different occasions (on this point, see Alberti). Moreover, this approach has been consolidated over the time and still constitutes a reality for the EU financial governance. Indeed, the dispute at stake concerned a series ..read more

Blogpost 51/2022 I. Introduction Should you receive compensation for the harm caused by illegal data use? This question may soon have an answer. The Austrian Supreme Court asked the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) how the right to compensation for non-material damages in the GDPR should be interpreted. Other courts have referred comparable questions to the ECJ. On October 6th 2022 the Advocate General (AG) Campos Sánchez-Bordona delivered his Opinion regarding the Case C-300/21. This blog post aims at providing a short analysis of the AG Opinion. It is argued that the proposed thr ..read more

Blogpost 50/2022 On 14 September 2022, the European Parliament declared that Hungary can no longer be considered a full democracy. The adoption of this position was followed by the Commission’s proposal for a Council implementing decision that, if adopted, would trigger the measures envisaged in the Conditionality Regulation concerning the suspension of certain EU budgetary commitments towards Hungary. While EU institutions keep looking to the EU Treaties for effective tools to address the rule of law crisis, Hungary and Poland exploit those very same Treaties to exercise their ‘vetocracy’ on ..read more

Blogpost 49/2022 All involved in data protection law are well acquainted with the constant anxiety arising in the context of international data transfers since the Schrems decisions of the ECJ. Long story short: According to Art. 44-49 GDPR there has to be a legal basis for transferring personal data from the European Union to third countries. The ambitious goal is to ensure compliance with the protection standards of the GDPR in the global world of data transfers even outside the Union. A very important line of data transfer is the one from the EU towards the US and the provisions are necessa ..read more