Search

The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union adopted on 9 March 2011 the Directive on the application of patients' rights in cross-border healthcare. This Directive emerged as a result of the Court of Justice's jurisprudence on social security coverage of healthcare obtained outside the Member State where the patient has social security protection. The aim of this paper is to investigate the Directive and determine whether it will add (once transposed into national legal systems) to the current set of patient entitlements and make it easier for patients to obtain socially covered healthcare outside the state of social protection, and to discuss the Directive's application in Croatia once the country joins the EU. The paper analyses the Patient Mobility Directive by focusing on the issue of whether the Directive actually contributes to patient mobility in the EU and also its relationship with national social security legislation, especially in Croatia. The paper argues that the Patient Mobility Directive's impact on the actual movement of patients across borders might prove to be counterproductive in some areas, due to its limiting certain entitlements to access socially covered healthcare abroad. On the other hand, the Directive will also add to some patients' entitlements in accessing healthcare abroad and improve (from the patients' point of view) certain aspects of the overall framework for obtaining cross-border healthcare. Therefore, the Directive's impact in terms of facilitating patients' ability to obtain socially covered healthcare outside the Member State of social protection remains ambivalent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of voting patterns in the Council of the European Union (EU) have increased since voting records in this institution have become more readily available. This paper builds on earlier work and explores coalition-formation and voting in the Council of the EU for the EU-15 (i.e., between 1995 and 2004), by analyzing cleavage patterns based on voting records for this institution. Focusing on the pre-enlargement phase, the paper provides new insights into earlier member state voting behavior in the Council on the basis of a range of independent variables, including governments' absolute and relative positions on the left-right policy dimension, pro-integration sentiments among domestic publics, governments' positions as either net beneficiaries or net payers into the EU budget and finally, number of votes in the Council. In methodological terms, we treat vote decisions as panel data and report adjusted standard errors for country-based clusters, using ordered probit regression to explain the propensity of EU member states to vote 'yes', abstain from voting, or vote 'no' in the Council. The ordered probit analysis used to explore the potential relevance of these dimensions provides insights that at times confirm, but also partially contradict, earlier findings on this topic. We notably find strong evidence for a North-South cleavage pre-enlargement, a significant role for the Presidency and moderate evidence for the relevance of public opinion and government left-right positioning in Council voting behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of three major aspects has been carried out that may apply to any of the successive voting systems used for the European Union Council of Ministers, from the first one established in the Treaty of Rome in 1958 to the current one established in Lisbon. We mainly consider the voting systems designed for the enlarged European Union adopted in the Athens summit, held in April 2003 but this analysis can be applied to any other system. First, it is shown that the dimension of these voting systems does not, in general, reduce. Next, the egalitarian effects of superposing two or three weighted majority games (often by introducing additional consensus) are considered. Finally, the decisiveness of these voting systems is evaluated and compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 2004, the Conference for EU-Related Affairs (CARUE) approved two agreements governing the participation of the autonomous communities in the Council of the European Union and its preparatory bodies. After more than seven years of implementation, the system is not bringing the expected results. The problems identified in practice in a context, moreover, of institutional and economic crisis, call for new approaches. The following paper analyses the main obstacles that have arisen since the implementation of the 2004 agreements with a view to determining future prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Framework Decision designed by the Council of the European Union (CEU) to fight against serious forms of xenophobia and racism by criminal law in Europe. It states that the comprehensive framework notes an important movement in the development of European Union (EU) human rights guidelines. It also cites that the European Commission for Democracy examined several EU studies of the relation of freedom of speech, racism and press freedom with special attention to religious defamation. It also mentions that the EU and the United Nation Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) disagree on the freedom from religious defamation.

The present article explores whether the first Trio Presidency of the Council of Ministers of the European Union (EU), composed of Germany, Portugal and Slovenia, lived up to the goal of ensuring greater continuity and sustainability in managing the Council?s work. Focusing on the Trio?s performance in promoting the principle of Policy Coherence for Development (PCD) in EU global action, the article explores patterns of cooperation established by the first Trio alongside the traditional roles of the rotating presidency, as the manager, provider of political initiative, broker, and representative of the Council and member states. The contribution demonstrates the emergence of a distinctive cooperation pattern among Germany, Portugal, and Slovenia, which we refer to as „Trio effects?. While such effects were established in all presidency functions with the exception of EU external representation, the Trio effects in exerting management functions contributed most in having more continuity in the promotion of the PCD. Taking into account the particular institutional and procedural context in which the Trio operated, the contribution draws lessons for the role of the Trio in the post-Lisbon external action system. Along with the review of official policy documents and secondary sources, this contribution draws on 40 anonymous semi-structured expert interviews, which were conducted by both authors between 2007 and 2009 in Brussels, Berlin, Lisbon and Ljubljana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]