Monica Claes

• Maastricht University

The article asks whether the European Union (EU)’s duty to protect national identities is a useful way to address diverging conceptions of fundamental rights, and it argues that it is not. On the basis of an examination of the text of Article 4(2) TEU, its history and the practice of the Court of Justice, it is argued that the concept of ‘national...

In this book, legal scholars from the EU Member States (with the addition of the UK) analyse the development of the EU Member States' attitudes to economic, fiscal, and monetary integration since the Treaty of Maastricht. The Eurozone crisis corroborated the warnings of economists that weak economic policy coordination and loose fiscal oversight w...

The Constitution of the Netherlands, which dates back to 1814–15, is an evolutionary constitution, based on incremental historical developments. A notable feature is that the Constitution bans constitutional review of Acts of Parliament and of treaties. A bill of rights was introduced in 1983; however, it omits a number of rights included in the EC...

Hart Publishing

Judicial serendipity: how Portuguese judges came to the rescue of the Polish judiciary - Volume 14 Issue 3 - Matteo Bonelli, Monica Claes

This article places the Gauweiler reference in a broader comparative perspective, in two distinct ways. First, it offers a comparative analysis of the positions of other constitutional courts on the primacy of EU and national constitutional reservations, in order to test the allegation of the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsge...

On 18 December 2014, the Court of Justice of the EU ruled in its Opinion 2/13 that the EU cannot accede to the ECHR under the terms of the negotiated Draft Accession Agreement. The Opinion and the stalemate it seems to have caused, raise important questions concerning the overall landscape of fundamental rights protection in Europe. Can the Court’s...

Luxembourg, Here We Come? Constitutional Courts and the Preliminary Reference Procedure - Volume 16 Issue 6 - Monica Claes

This contribution revisits the Bundesverfassungsgericht's order for reference in the Gauweiler case and focuses on two aspects of that order that until now have not received much scholarly attention. The first concerns the German federal constitutional court's dissociation of constitutional identity review under the German Basic Law from national i...

A Constitutional moment: Acceding to the ECHR (or not) - Volume 11 Issue 1 - Leonard Besselink, Monica Claes, Jan-Herman Reestman

Note from the Editorial Board - Volume 11 Issue 1 - Leonard Besselink, Monica Claes, Jan-Herman Reestman

This study investigates national constitutional limits to further EU integration and explores ways to overcome them. It includes an in-depth examination of the constitutional systems of 12 Member States (Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom) and a b...

Courts are increasingly pursuing partnerships with foreign counterparts by organising themselves in networks—at their own initiative or at the instigation of the European legislature. This chapter adopts a critical approach to this phenomenon to highlight its advantages and drawbacks. First, it explores the wide variety of judicial networks current...

This Chapter asks why EU law should not be involved in private law relationships. Why would the EU need additional justification to be so, in a way that states and national law presumably do not? Is there anything in the essence of the EU and EU law to prevent its involvement in relationships between private parties? And vice versa, is there someth...

What does doing comparative law involve? Too often, explicit methodological discussions in comparative law remain limited to the level of pure theory, neglecting to test out critiques and recommendations on concrete issues. This book bridges this gap between theory and practice in comparative legal studies. Essays by both established and younger co...

This article critically examines the functioning of European judicial networks as one modality of transnational dialogues between judges. In order to provide a conceptual framework, we first explore the meaning of the concepts of 'network', 'dialogue' and 'constitutional pluralism' and find that existing channels of communication between national c...

We as constitutionalists owe it to ourselves and even to the 500 million other citizens of a member state and of the Union at the same time, to come up with a legally and constitutionally readable understanding of the situation. It must not be one suffering from the split between international and domestic public law. It must not mystify the Union...

Summary: In the process of European integration, national constitutional law remains crucial, in several respects. The EU Constitution, in its broadest sense, builds on the common constitutional traditions and principles of the Member States, and EU law refers back to national constitutional law in many ways. National constitutional law contributes...

The last 10 years of EU integration has seen a “rights revolution”, at least in so far as fundamental rights are increasingly the register through which legal conflicts in the EU are articulated. But how are EU fundamental rights enforced in a legal order where enforcement relies upon the navigation of multiple institutions and levels of law? This...