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In the rise of authoritarian trends in Hungary and in Poland, public broadcasters play a crucial role in supporting the political forces in power. There are many examples which show how public broadcasters influence public opinion by selective coverage and distorted remit. While the problem of media plurality is often commented upon from the perspective of fundamental rights or the rule of law, another relevant perspective is that of internal market and economic law. The article analyses how can one make sure that the use of public funds to support State media does not lead to the distortion of citizens’ rights to be informed. The article argues that the current EU State Aid framework allows the balance of Member States’ prerogatives in respect to media freedom and content with the risk of EU-imposed censure. The article analyses the place of media pluralism in EU law and demonstrates that media pluralism has been integrated within the internal market framework, including an analysis of recent amendments to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. Then, it focuses on the relationship between media pluralism, public service broadcasting and EU State aid law.

This Article explores the manner in which, faced with the rule of law crisis generated by the 2017–2019 national legislative reforms, the Romanian judicial associations, organized as NGOs, have fulfilled their declared purpose of safeguarding judicial independence. By relying on effective communication tactics—including international networking and lobbying or informal discussions with high-level EU representatives—coupled with a strategic use of preliminary references, they have shed light on some of the most sensitive elements of the Romanian context, garnering both internal and international support in the process. In particular, by taking advantage of the CJEU’s increased willingness to engage with questions concerning the rule of law and the organization of the national judicial systems, the Romanian judicial associations have managed to design strategies capable of triggering preliminary rulings on the most heated and politically charged questions concerning the judiciary. This Article seeks to highlight the specific features and informal elements of such strategies.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is often viewed as a revered champion of opposition to autocratic reforms in the Member States. In the context of the rule of law crisis in Poland, however, its resolute support for judicial independence contrasts notably with the limited improvements for judges on the ground. As the present investigation suggests, this discrepancy can be explained by a mode of incremental adjustments at national level that has allowed Polish lawmakers to repeatedly neutralise the effects of the Court’s interventions. Resulting from this strategy are several instances of mutually responsive interaction between the Court of Justice and autocratic national lawmakers that have shaped developments in the rule of law crisis, both at national and supranational level. At national level, lawmakers have incrementally adjusted reforms to comply – at least superficially – with supranational judicial interventions, whereas the Court refined its interpretation of supranational safeguards of judicial independence in response to incremental adjustments in Polish law. Yet, more recently, this interaction of inadvertent mutual inspiration may have come to a halt. Rather than changing national law to superficially respond to supranational judicial interventions, Polish authorities may increasingly deny the Court’s authority to adjudicate in matters of judicial independence in the Member States altogether.

A wind of change is blowing through the European judicial landscape. During the past decade, the European Union (EU) judiciary has undergone its biggest institutional overhaul in generations, the rise of authoritarian populism in Central and Eastern Europe has prompted a Rule of Law crisis, several supreme and constitutional courts challenged the supremacy of EU law, while the Court of Justice re-articulated the scope of the duty to refer under Article 267 TFEU and, for the first time, found that domestic last-instance courts breaching it triggered state liability. This Article argues that these and similar developments, once looked at together, suggest that something fundamental has shifted in the EU’s judicial architecture. A new form of judicial federalism has emerged, which departs from the traditional way in which relations between EU and Member State courts used to be structured. Although this new federalism is multifaceted and is marked by both centripetal and centrifugal forces, its distinguishing feature is a stronger centralisation, which manifests itself in a considerably expanded federal judiciary, a greater emphasis on hierarchy, a more careful use of European judicial resources, as well as tighter supervision of national procedures and court structures.

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2022 7(2), 697-719 | Article | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction. - II. Protecting EU values through ESI funds: The new fundamental rights "enabling conditions". - III. Decentralising the "politics of values": The potential of the Justice, Rights and Values Fund. - IV. The Recovery and Resilience Facility: Shaping Europe's recovery in line with EU values. - V. Conclusions. | (Abstract) In recent years, the EU budget has emerged as an attractive instrument to foster compliance with the fundamental values enshrined in art. 2 TEU. Especially following the exceptional increase in EU expenditure, the power of the purse seems to provide indeed more persuasive arguments compared with the existing EU rule-of-law toolbox. While most of the attention has focused exclusively on the rule-of-law conditionality regime ultimately introduced with Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2020/2092, this Article argues that the EU budget offers further, and arguably more promising, avenues to protect, promote and enforce the EU common values through financial means. Most notably, this Article explores the potential and challenges of the EU budget as a values-oriented policy instrument focus-ing on three elements of the new budgetary framework: i) the set of fundamental rights "enabling conditions" attached to the European Structural and Investment Funds, among which stands out an horizontal enabling condition related to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights; ii) the "Justice, Rights and Values Fund", with special attention to the reforms concerning the financing of civil society organisations; iii) the "Recovery and Resilience Facility", which provides valuable instruments to police compliance with rule of law and fundamental rights standards thanks to its connection with the European Semester and the European Pillar of Social Rights.

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2022 7(2), 909-928 | Article | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction. - I.1. From initial rejection to acceptance of differentiated integration as an institutional feature of the EU migration policy. - I.2. The "migration crisis" and the "fractured values" of the EU migration policy: differentiated integration as an indicator or a catalyst? - II. Differentiation as a governance tool: the intergovernmental roots of the EU migration policy. - II.1. Defining EU migration policy. - II.2. The evolution of the EU migration policy: from a purely intergovernmental to a quasi-fully integrated policy. - II.3. The institutional challenges of differentiation for EU migration policy: defining the territorial scope of EU migration law. - III. Intersecting the migration' and rule of law "crises": Unveiling a deeper layer of differentiated integration? - III.1. From the institutional to the normative dimension of differentiation in the EU migration policy. - III.2. Worlds apart? The dis-connection between the rule of law and migration "crises" in the case law of the CJEU. - IV. Final remarks. | (Abstract) As with the whole Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ), EU migration policy is one area of EU policy-making in which differentiated integration has found its clearest expression. Owing to its intergovernmental roots, differentiated governance has been considered the necessary compromise for a deeper integration in this policy field since the Amsterdam Treaty entered into force. The adoption of flexible mechanisms aimed to accommodate the political interests of some Member States. While many of the technical intricacies related to this special institutional set-up have now disappeared in the aftermath of Brexit, looking at the possible intersections between the recent migration and rule of law "crises" has brought to the fore a more serious form of disagreement between the Member States on the deeper values - or the possible absence thereof - with respect to EU migration policy. This has become especially clear in the way in which the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) seems to have adopted a disconnected approach in its case law relating, respectively, to the "rule of law crisis" and the "migration crisis" so far. This Article argues that beyond the fragmented scope of the EU migration policy caused by differentiation, lies a deeper "fracture" on the values that underpin it. In this sense, it invites for a more careful examination of what could become a widening gap by examining especially the relevant case law of the CJEU on asylum in the aftermath of the "migration crisis".

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2022 7(2), 749-771 | Article | (Table of Contents) I. Clear occasions. - II. Confirmation and advancement of rule of law value-dogmatics. - II.1. Voluntariness of accession, pre-legal normativity of values. - II.2. Updating the dogmatic of self-assertion under the rule of law. - II.3. Conclusion: working with protection obligations while restraining from intervening in the constitutional conflict. - III. Reconceptualizing unrestricted primacy. - III.1. The traditional basis. - III.2. First addition: elements of international law to strengthen primacy? - III.3. Second addition: equality through primacy, subordination through self-obligation. - III.4. Conclusion: "normed" primacy as a result of selective listening. - IV. Conclusion: Union law's identity between dialogical crisis containment and constitutional monologue. | (Abstract) The Grand Chamber's judgment of 21 December 2021 on rule of law deficits in Romania underlines the vulnerability of the Union's legal order. The facts of the case vividly demonstrate once again that its weak spot is spread across the national judicial systems of the Member States. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) opposes the developments by further strengthening the values while underlining special obligations Romania entered into upon accession. Of central importance beyond that are the Court's first additions to the long standing reasoning on Union Law's unrestricted primacy. The argumentation resembles a closing figure which is supposed to resolve the irreconcilable claims of final authority in favour of Union law. The attempt turns out to be unconvincing because the constitutional foundations of the integration process and its plurality of actors are selectively ignored.

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2022 7(1), 275-286 | European Forum Insight of 2 June 2022 | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction. - II. Escalation in the rule of law crisis: Dissonance in the European Union's perception of the rule of law. - III. The European Union solution to the illiberal crisis: Untangling or entangling rule of law? - IV. The decision of the European Court of Justice and the new rule of law perspective conditioned upon a sound financial management. - V. Conclusion. | (Abstract) The recent rule of law crisis is partly due to the inertia of the European institutions regarding the implementation of the mechanism within art. 7 TEU. This is despite the variety of actions that could be taken by the EU regarding maintaining high levels of respect for the rule of law within the EU. Hence it seems that the rule of law crisis has come to stay. The escalation in the rule of law crisis creates a dissonance regarding the way the European Union perceives the rule of law, and points to the ambiguity in terms of content and legal nature. This dissonance adds to the existing tension between the claims of an illiberal constitutional identity and the violation of the rule of law. Illiberalism refers to representative democracies which do not necessarily guarantee fundamental rights and/or the rule of law. The law crisis reached its peak when the introduction of the rule of law Conditionality Regulation was believed to be the solution. The rule of law Conditionality Regulation was subject to an action for annulment introduced by Hungary and Poland and was dismissed by the ECJ in its long-awaited rulings after the case C-156/21 ECLI:EU:C:2022:97 and case C-157/21 ECLI:EU:C:2022:98. Even if the ECJ made it clear that the Regulation is not a substitute nor a reinstatement of the art. 7 TEU procedure, we can only wait to see how the Regulation will be applied. The rule of law violations was linked directly to the allocation of EU budget, and this raises questions about the challenges at stake.

There is no point in denying the significance of the Right to be forgotten for the state of judicial dialogue in Europe. It vindicates the position of the BVerfG as a court deserving international recognition for advancing the law in the crucial field of data protection. Nevertheless, restricting the scope of analysis to the narrow context of judicial dialogue misses the wider context of the rise of authoritarian constitutionalism in certain EU Member States. In this respect, it is of the highest significance that the decisions on the Right to be forgotten effectively eliminate the imagined normative hierarchy between domestic and EU law that provided the basis for the BVerfG’s jurisprudence ever since Solange I and Maastricht. Moreover, by reasserting the primacy of EU law, the BVerfG strengthens the position of embattled judges in Poland facing disciplinary action for implementing the primacy of EU law. The concern shown by some members of the First Senate for the situation in Poland corroborates this reading.

The use of Article 7 TEU against Poland and Hungary has been generally welcomed with relief, proving that, at last, the EU is ready to defend Article 2 TEU values when Member States openly violate them. However, it is not clear yet what the main value that is claimed to be breached − the rule of law − amounts to in the EU. Actually, the resort to Article 7 TEU crowns a process of equipping the EU with a rule of law framework to combat Member States’ failures in both law making and enforcement, regardless of the law’s content and provenance. This article demonstrates that the EU rule of law is anchored to a ‘thin’ conceptualisation of the ideal and that the EU is moving from a mere rule of EU law towards a more sophisticated EU rule of law perspective. This process is, at the same time, enlarging the boundaries of the EU legal order and reaffirming the Union character − and not Unity only − of EU integration through law.