Suchergebnisse

In Case C-134/19 P Bank Refah Kargaran, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) made an important pronouncement over its jurisdiction on Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), as it held that it can hear an action for damages allegedly suffered by a natural or legal person because of restrictive measures adopted under CFSP. This article reflects on this important development in the case law of the CJEU, by putting it in the context of what scholarship on the topic has referred to as the 'normalization' of CFSP. In addition, the article comments upon the potential significance of the decision in Bank Refah for the EU's external posture. The decision, this article argues, recognizes the opportunity to seek damages stemming from CFSP acts – including decisions adopted under the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), that is decisions establishing military operations of civilian missions, and, in those contexts, acts or conduct attributable to EU bodies.
damages, non-contractual liability, CFSP acts, normalization, CSDP missions and operations, restrictive measures, jurisdiction, CJEU, sanctions.

The article introduces a text corpus containing all the legal acts adopted by the European Union from 1 December 2009 till 30 June 2019; it also provides an open-source built-for-purpose software toolbox that can be used to re-create and manipulate the dataset. The dataset, as well as the software toolbox, are publicly available on GitHub at: https://github.com/ndrplz/eurlextoolbox. The article describes the content and possible uses of the dataset and maps out some potential applications thereof. Since EU law plays a key role in virtually all aspects of European integration, we believe that the dataset, by making the legal dimension easily accessible, could be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience. Building on previous literature on text-as-data approaches and qualitative methods applied to EU law, we make the case for an interdisciplinary agenda, and then illustrate it through research questions in a distinctive area of EU foreign affairs: the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).
European Union Law, European Union Law Database, Research Methodology, Data analysis, Text-as-Data, Corpus Analysis, Common Foreign and Security Policy

The European Union (EU) adopts restrictive measures – or sanctions – as part of its counterterrorism strategy. These measures restrict the fundamental rights of the natural or legal persons they target and can be challenged in front of the General Court or the European Court of Justice (the CJEU).
Drawing from both legal scholarship and security studies, this article refines an analytical framework that enables an original analysis of the case law of the CJEU: we focus on 'proximity', an element so far neglected in the analysis of counter-terrorism sanctions. Proximity is the variable measuring the distance between the addressee of a measure from the actual commission of a terrorist act. Such a variable provides the analytical framework through which to test the hypotheses and findings proposed in the last decade by previous studies.
Such findings are mostly confirmed by our interdisciplinary analysis, but nuanced. While it is true that sanctions lead to a process of othering and stigmatization, the Court has introduced some meaningful procedural safeguards that contribute to protecting the fundamental rights of individuals, especially in the case of family members of suspected terrorists. Not dissimilarly from what was noted about judicial protection in other sanctions regimes, however, tensions remain in how to ensure effective substantive, as opposed to merely procedural, protection to sanctions addressees.
Terrorism, EU restrictive measures, Court of Justice of the European Union, fundamental rights, judicial protection

Autocrats confront a number of threats to their power, some from within the regime and others from foreign actors. To understand how these threats interact and affect autocratic survival, we build a model where an autocratic leader can be ousted by a domestic opposition and a foreign actor. We concentrate on the impact that foreign threats have on the stability of autocratic leadership and show that the presence of foreign threats increases the probability an autocrat retains power. Focusing on two cases, one where a foreign actor and the domestic opposition have aligned interests and one where their interests are misaligned, we elucidate two distinct mechanisms. First, when interests are aligned, autocrats are compelled to increase domestic security to alleviate international pressure. Second, when interests are misaligned, autocrats exploit the downstream threat of foreign intervention to deter domestic threats. We also show that autocrats have incentives to cultivate ideological views hostile to broader interests among politically influential domestic actors.