Is the ECJ kind of a Supreme Court that can overturn member state laws and rulings?
I had the impression member states were 100% sovereign within the EU...
I had the impression member states were 100% sovereign within the EU...
For practical reasons most EU countries want to be in compliance with EU law and will often follow ECJ recommendations and change their own laws if found to not be compliant. Also many EU countries have laws that essentially state that all their laws must comply with EU law.
The other option is to apply for an explicit opt out of certain a EU regulation that you feel is incompatible with your own laws.
Isn’t granting the ECJ jurisdiction is a requirement of EU membership?
Germany [1] and Hungary [2] played with this fire. In summary, no.
Treaties have force of law. If a country improperly ratified their EU treaties, they need to amend their constitution (if it exists) or admit they never properly joined the EU in the first place. Given the latter means economic collapse for most EU members, it’s not a hard choice.
[1] https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/06/nick-kenny-german-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/first-eu-seen-moving-cut-money...
No country is or can be forced to be a EU member.
Just because there are economic implications does not mean the EU treaties are above the countries‘ constitutions the people actually chose to enact.
However, once you decide to stay within the law it is indeed possible to have EU treaties stand above the constitution. In situations where you've added bits in your constitution that the EU treaty has priority, acting like this isn't true is simply breaking the law.
Likewise, for most of my life, my personal political and economic interests included a strong UK (still does even though I moved to Germany) and USA even though I never lived there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta...
This differs from the situation in the US where Texas couldn't pass an amendment to their state constitution declaring that they are no longer subject to federal law. State law is subordinate to federal law / the US constitution.
If things went so far that the secession is desired it is already a civil war, and constitution of 'some people out there over the creek' doesn't matter.
I think that was the lesson of the 1860s.
Really? You mean that there is something in the US Constitution that explicitly allows a state to secede?
"In the public debate over the Nullification Crisis the separate issue of secession was also discussed. James Madison, often referred to as "The Father of the Constitution", strongly opposed the argument that secession was permitted by the Constitution.[29] In a March 15, 1833, letter to Daniel Webster (congratulating him on a speech opposing nullification), Madison discussed "revolution" versus "secession":
I return my thanks for the copy of your late very powerful Speech in the Senate of the United S. It crushes "nullification" and must hasten the abandonment of "Secession". But this dodges the blow by confounding the claim to secede at will, with the right of seceding from intolerable oppression. The former answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged. The latter is another name only for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy."In general a country can't get out of an international treaty unless the treaty itself has provisions for it. Of course the only way to enforce an international treaty, if threats or sanctions are not enough, is war.
The EU isn't really a country, it's a free trade agreement with an unusually democratic (by the standard of FTAs) process for updating its own rules.
The EU isn't just a free trade agreement and it has never been just a free trade agreement. It has always been a political endeavour.
Of course that doesn't make it a country or a nation state at all, but let's not go too far in the other direction when trying to describe it.
There is no codified legal process for a US state to leave the Union, and the only previous attempt caused a civil war
A member of the EU has both an implicit right to withdraw from the treaties (deriving from international customary law around treaties) and an explicit legal path to follow. A process which they control in their entirety (as in they can't be forced to stay longer than they wish by the other countries and can't be forced to leave earlier than the prescribed deadline)
As I understand it, the way this usually works is by national law explicitly endorsing EU law (usually at the level of the national constitution) and stating that in the event of any contradiction between EU law and domestic law, EU law will prevail. So EU law is "supreme" in practice, but that supremacy is granted/recognised under the domestic constitutional order.
In some countries, this recognition is limited, such that national courts will not permit EU law to override certain aspects of the national constitutional order. When that happens, there is really no easy solution.
An interesting recent example is https://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-closes-case-against... where the German court found that an ECB bond-buying programme was unconstitutional and in doing so refused to follow a prior decision of the ECJ.
Another consequence of this approach to supremacy is that significant changes to the EU treaties require a constitutional amendment in Ireland, which requires a referendum. To my knowledge Ireland is the only country to have such a binding legal requirement, with the effect that a number of amendments to the treaties have in the past been delayed or defeated by the Irish public voting against them.
100%? Only those with a nuclear deterrent, and maybe not even them. Otherwise, there is always a bigger fish.
Edit: I can see some people don't believe me. Do you really think treaties are more than paper if you don't have force to back them up? The US has threatened to invade the Hague if they try to charge Americans with war crimes. Went beyond mere threats in fact, congress and Bush the younger enshrined this threat in Federal Law.
There is a foce that can build up. If the U.S starts going rough someone else will take its place. We've already seen pieces moving during Trump's term. U.S's soft power helps it more than you think.
North Korea is more "sovereign" than the U.S. in your book. Good economic and political relations with your neighbours can make you more powerful than being a sovereign lunatic.
In practice, the US can do much more of whatever it pleases than North Korea can. The US can invade most countries on a whim, and has demonstrated this ability numerous times in living memory, while the North Korean government mostly just fumes for the past few decades. But more to your point, yes, North Korea has more sovereignty than most; they are one of the few countries America can't invade on a whim.
The bottom line is that the "paper treaties" allowed the world to function and create economic growth/trade not a sovereignty dogma. I think the total sovereignty dogma didn't exist even in the medieval times. Its roots are rather religious. I'm not sure where you want to go with that. Certainly not towards prosperity.
You don't want international treaties with nations you can't invade or what's exactly the gist of it?
Being a super power has benefits. That doesn't mean you can break economic treaties without consequences or that you can invade countries every time you don't like their economic policy. Bad behaviour brings reputational damage. Wars are costly(economic and politically). Soon enough you may find yourself alone and that you are not a super power anymore(i.e Russia).
Being a small country like NK or the UK you can play ball with the system or become poor. If you want to change the system you must be a super power and/or have powerful friends(i.e not sovereign)
Secondly France has huge problems with sovereignty because it can't make a computer. That's the impediment to their sovereignty. Nukes the have, that's not the issue. And even America is struggling with supply lines, looks like nobody can make a computer anymore.
~80-90% depending on how you measure.
The judiciary of all countries is technically under the ECJ jurisdiction. People can sue their countries, and local court decisions can be appealed to the European court structure (ECJ/ECHR).
That was in fact one of the Brexit talking points, judiciary independence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...
Yes. See e.g.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/government_in_ireland/...
Practically, if a national law is found to be not compliant with the EU legislation, the country has some time to adjust it to make it compliant or to repel it. In court cases, the Constitutional Court can directly strike the provision in the law or the entire law, as appropriate.
This has, of course, changed over the last century, and US states lost most of their sovereignty. I predict the same will happen to EU states over the next century.
Member states have agency to leave the EU whenever they'd like if they wish not to be bound by agreed upon laws
There was a national referendum before the Lisbon treaties that was declined by the Netherlands and France, which in turn "watered down" the EU constitution into the Lisbon treaties which are now in use, which were then ratified without any national votes.
As the German politician Martin Scholz once said, if the EU were to apply for an EU membership, it would get declined because of a lack of a democratic foundation.
That's the way it should be.
In a democratic state, the state itself is sovereign, while the citizens are not. The rights of the citizens depend on the constitution, which can be changed according to a democratic process. The EU is a union of sovereign states. Due to that sovereignty, decision-making in the EU cannot be fully democratic, as that would violate the sovereign rights of the member states.
EU member states have voluntarily agreed that in some situations, EU law takes priority over national law. But because the member states are sovereign, it's up to them to decide how to proceed when EU and national laws are in conflict. The EU has only limited means to sanction member states that breach their laws. It cannot arrest and prosecute German lawmakers. It can't declare German laws invalid, except to the extent German institutions voluntarily follow EU rulings. It can't forcibly rewrite German laws. And in extreme situations, it can't declare Germany's Constitution unconstitutional and invalid, and it can't forcibly rewrite it.