04 February 2017

Trump, Taricco, Turks and Tusk

Dear Friends of Verfassungsblog,

this has, once again, not been the happiest week for constitutionalists. Donald Trump’s barrage of executive orders had many of us gasping from shock and bewilderment, most of all the order to detain and, in some cases, deport citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries regardless of their right of residence in the US. Constitutionally, the President is widely unrestrained in matters of foreign policy in the US – but that does not necessarily mean that the Constitution lets him get away with deliberately arbitrary measures, as MOHAMMAD FADEL points out in his stringent analysis of the “Muslim ban”. And then there is international law: The ways this policy violates the international obligations of the US are detailed in our interview with JAMES HATHAWAY, among them the duty not to discriminate refugees for reasons of country of origin or religion. The US are under no legal duty whatsoever, though, to take in refugees at all, as their commitment to refugee resettlement – the largest, besides Canada and Australia, by far in the world – is purely voluntary. This results in a horrible catch-22 situation for proponents of international refugee law: If they take the US government to court, the Republicans might be induced to dump the resettlement program entirely, leaving those in need of protection in a much worse situation than before…

Mayors of US cities have been among the fiercest critics of President Trump’s immigration policy, offering their cities as „sanctuaries“ to undocumented aliens threatened by deportation. Trump, in his turn, has declared his determination to strip these cities from federal funding. As HELMUT PHILIPP AUST explains, the phenomenon of „Sancutary Cities“ is nothing new in the US but part of an ongoing competence struggle between the Federal and the State level of legislation. Fun fact: it might have been the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, of all people, who set up a possible legal stumbling block for President Trump to trip over in his 1997 opinion in Printz vs. United States, where he claimed that “the Federal Government may not compel the States to implement, by legislation or executive action, federal regulatory programs”.

The part of the US constitution that could become a real problem for the billionaire President with his many business interests abroad is the so-called „Emolument Clause“ which forbids holders of public office to accept remunerations „of any kind whatever“ from foreign countries. JUD MATHEWS examines the merits of a complaint filed by a nonprofit government ethics group in federal court. They might have a case, he finds, but likely no standing to get it heard in court: the infamous Clapper v. Amnesty International ruling from 2013, by which the Supreme Court rejected Amnesty’s standing to protest surveillance, makes it hard for citizens to hold the government legally accountable for constitutional overstepping.

Judges of Europe

While Trump dominated the headlines, another huge issue of concern for the constitutionalist community in Europe went by largely undetected: The authority of the European Court of Justice has been challenged and contested in unprecedented ways in recent weeks. As MIKAEL MADSEN, HENRIK PALMER OLSEN and URSKA SADL report, the Danish Supreme Court is openly defying the Luxembourg court with a boldness that would even make the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court writhe with unease. In Italy, the Constitutional Court has just sent back a case back to Luxembourg for the second time, insisting that the CJEU takes its concerns about Italian constitutional traditions seriously – MARCO BASSANI and ORESTE POLLICINO’s analysis of the Taricco decision is here, and PIETRO FARAGUNA’s here. DANIEL SARMIENTO has a stern warning for the Luxembourg judges to resist the urge to engage in any more haughty snubbing exercises at the cost of their national counterparts, unless they want to inflict some serious damage on the coherence of EU law.

Another challenge for the EU, albeit more political than legal, is coming from Romania where streets are filling with protesters every night after the government has dismembered anti-corruption laws to shield corrupt politicians from justice. What this is all about and why it matters constitutionally is explained in a lucid post by BIANCA SELEJAN-GUTAN.

Romania might follow the tracks of Poland as the next target of a EU rule of law investigation, which maybe gives the Commission an opportunity to grow back some teeth. Spain, on the other hand, seems also an interesting case with the Polish experience in mind: DANIEL TODA CASTÁN reports on the way the Spanish Senate handled the nomination of a number of judges to the Spanish Constitutional Tribunal, putting political party interests above its obligation to give the autonomous regions a voice in the constitutional court. This as well as the Polish case, Daniel claims, should make all of us think long and hard about the regulations regarding our constitutional courts and the possibilities of political manhandling they hold.

The Italian Constitutional Court, besides its Taricco decision, has handed down its judgment in the case of the Italian electoral law. What this judgment entails and whether it adds to the prospect of making the messy political landscape of Italy any tidier is explained by FRANCESCO CLEMENTI.

AIDAN O’NEILL picks apart once more the UK Supreme Court’s momentous Miller decision about Brexit as a matter of no concern for the devolved assemblies in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, in his view “essentially a case which was argued before, and decided by, the court on the basis of the English Imperial constitutional tradition forged in the Victorian age.”

Turkey is facing something far worse than Victorianism, constitution-wise. TOLGA SIRIN offers an analysis of the proposed constitutional amendments transferring the pluralistic democracy in Turkey into a “winner-take-all loser-lose all” system of unencumbered Presidential power without any meaningful checks and balances.

All heartache about democratic values aside, Turkey remains a trusted parter for the EU to keep the lid on the refugee influx into Europe, and so might be Libya soon if the latest EU Council meeting in Malta is anything to go by. DANA SCHMALZ reminds the EU leaders of the legal and ethical boundaries their refugee policy with respect to Libya as a place of allegedly systematic torture underlie, and of the fact that the refugee crisis offers the EU an opportunity to stand united (as Council President Tusk so insistently demands) in being and remaining an open society in the face of an aggressively exclusive USA (in German).

Elsewhere

All best,

Max Steinbeis


Leave A Comment

WRITE A COMMENT

1. We welcome your comments but you do so as our guest. Please note that we will exercise our property rights to make sure that Verfassungsblog remains a safe and attractive place for everyone. Your comment will not appear immediately but will be moderated by us. Just as with posts, we make a choice. That means not all submitted comments will be published.

2. We expect comments to be matter-of-fact, on-topic and free of sarcasm, innuendo and ad personam arguments.

3. Racist, sexist and otherwise discriminatory comments will not be published.

4. Comments under pseudonym are allowed but a valid email address is obligatory. The use of more than one pseudonym is not allowed.