How faint-hearted of me. Viktor Orbán, as it turns out, can indeed be voted out. His authoritarian regime rested on the premise that his party, even in the event of electoral defeat, would retain the power to determine how successfully and for how long his successor could govern, hemmed in on all sides by cardinal laws that can only be amended by a two-thirds majority, and by Fidesz-dominated institutions – the President, the Attorney General, the Governor of the National Bank, the State Audit Office, the Constitutional Court – all capable of throwing a spanner in the works whenever Opposition Leader Orbán found it useful to do so, each appointed to endless terms of office and elected by a two-thirds majority. Thus, even in the event of an electoral defeat, nothing worse would befall him than having to let his successor rack up a year or two of failures, before finally, to everyone’s relief, engineering fresh elections and returning to power in triumph, his democratic credentials unimpeachable. This premise holds so long as his successor does not in turn secure the very two-thirds majority to which Orbán owed his control over the institutions in the first place. Once it no longer holds, the entire edifice collapses. My faith in democratic providence had not been sufficient to foresee that. My bad. Anyone who wishes to raise a glass to that is most welcome – there is plenty of champagne to go round.

Look at Hungary! For a decade and a half, Verfassungsblog has essentially been preaching this very sentence in ever new variations. “A regime is taking shape here that, in the name of national unity, is using democracy, law, and the constitution to cement its own power.” I wrote that on 22 January 2011. This Saturday marks exactly fifteen years to the day since Orbán’s new constitution was proclaimed. Shortly before that, I travelled to Budapest and wrote a piece for the FAZ. I spoke with Hungarian constitutional scholars, many of whom went on to become regular contributors to our publication. Together with Christian Boulanger, I organised signatures for an open letter of protest that appeared in Die Zeit. With Alexandra Kemmerer and Christoph Möllers, I devised the format of the blog symposium and tested it in February 2012 on the “Rescue Package for EU Fundamental Rights” conceived by Armin von Bogdandy and his team – a safety net the EU was supposed to be able to deploy over its citizens in the event of a total constitutional breakdown in a member state, i.e. Hungary. Hungary shaped my perspective on PiS rule in Poland from 2015 to 2023, on Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, on a great deal of what has happened in the world and has been a subject on Verfassungsblog ever since. Hungary was a decisive driving force in the development of this project, away from the journalistic one-man online diary of the early years and towards the transnational legal-scholarly platform of discourse that Verfassungsblog is today.

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Mapping Article 13: Academic and Scientific Freedom under the EU Charter
Vasiliki Kosta & Marie Müller-Elmau (eds.)

Academic freedom is under pressure. Though protected by Article 13 of the EU Charter, academic freedom in the context of EU law received practically no or very little attention. As legal and political developments accelerate, the meaning of this right is taking shape in real time. This edited volume puts Article 13 of the EU Charter in the spotlight and reflects its potential in light of past and present threats to academic freedom.

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And now that haunting is gone. That is the crucial point. Whether Péter Magyar’s Tisza party will make better use of its two-thirds majority than Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz made of its own may be hoped for but cannot be known. Far more important for the moment, however, is that the haunting is gone – along with the greasy, grinning gangster regime that performed it for sixteen years. The narrative that this regime had mastered the magic trick of having the democratic cake whilst devouring it in the most autocratic way, without anyone being able to do anything legally or politically effective about it – that narrative has been refuted. That is the crucial point.

And to that I raise my glass of champagne. Cheers, dear friends! The haunting is over – this particular haunting, at any rate. And yet: how much we learned from it and through it and about it. How many concepts were coined in its study. What is populism? That, right there, what they were doing in Hungary. Cheers, dear Jan-Werner Müller! The original Frankenstate, the archetype of authoritarian legalism. Cheers, dear Kim Scheppele! Cheers to all you scholactivists and rule-of-law zealots and constitutional Cassandras in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Princeton, Warsaw, Florence, wherever you may be! It is with you that I wish to savour this moment.

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Editor’s Pick

by JAKOB GAŠPERIN WISCHHOFF

The award-winning documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin takes place deep in rural Russia, in Karabash, widely regarded as the most polluted city in the world. A local teacher, Pasha, who is also responsible for filming events at the school, loves his job and offers his pupils a safe space for discussion and creativity. When the war in Ukraine starts, propaganda enters every corner of education – the pupils learn to march, and many of their brothers are taken to the front. Many never return. Pasha follows his principles and quits his job. But then he realises that he is the man with the camera, a perfect position to capture the absurdity and wickedness of this war propaganda in schools.

As everything changes and Russia becomes too dangerous for Pasha, he must eventually leave his grey, industrial city, which he genuinely loves. He takes his recordings with him and turns them into this documentary – now forbidden in Russia as extremist and terrorist propaganda. The story touched me with its simplicity and humanity. It shows the absurd extent of the indoctrination of the most vulnerable in society.

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The Week on Verfassungsblog

summarised by EVA MARIA BREDLER

It has actually happened. Orbán has been voted out! I really don’t want to spoil the champagne mood, but I’m afraid I still have a job to do. So here is a brief interruption with the key developments (there are some good ones too, I promise!).

The TISZA Party, led by Péter Magyar, has secured a constitutional majority in Hungary. While the result allows the creation of a new constitution, TÍMEA DRINÓCZI (ENG) warns that without broad legitimacy, this would risk reproducing the patterns of the previous regime.

For BARBARA ZELLER (ENG), the electoral victory is overshadowed by a constitutional dilemma: is it justified to disobey the constitution to rebuild democracy and the rule of law? She calls for constitutional disobedience, arguing that it may not only be justified but legally required to uphold substantive values.

If Hungary does manage to rebuild democracy one day, it might also stop being the prime example of authoritarianism in Europe. But today is not that day. So GIUSEPPE MARTINICO and UMBERTO LATTANZI (ENG) use it to contrast the judicial reform in Italy, which the electorate has rejected, with Hungary. Their verdict: Italy might be a system in poor health, but it is far from the undemocratic Hungarian example.

Now, please do briefly set your glass aside: Ecuador’s Constitutional Court is again under pressure from President Noboa’s government. ANDREAS GUTMANN, DIEGO NÚÑEZ SANTAMARÍA and ALEX VALLE FRANCO (ENG) delineate a broader struggle over constitutional limits in a system where most control institutions are already aligned with the executive.

The outlook is similarly troubling in Brazil, where the Banco Master scandal exposed how opacity and conflicts of interest can erode judicial integrity at the Supreme Court. JULIANO ZAIDEN BENVINDO and MIGUEL GODOY(ENG) draw lessons from India, which faced a very similar institutional crisis in 2018.

Meanwhile, India has passed a new Trans Rights Act, in a rushed legislative process. SARTHAK GUPTA (ENG) warns that the law shifts recognition of gender identity toward state verification, with significant implications for constitutional rights.

While state verification goes too far, every day we do depend on and trust in professional advice: doctors, lawyers, engineers, and whatnot. In its conversion therapy ruling, the US Supreme Court now reframes professional advice as protected speech. CLAUDIA E. HAUPT and ROBERT POST (ENG) argue that this move risks dismantling the legal framework that ensures competent professional advice.

In Germany, too, democratic rights are being mobilised against queer rights: the Saxony State Directorate has denied the CSD street festival in Dresden its status as a public assembly. A misguided signal at the wrong time, argues JASPER SIEGERT (GER), showing why the decision fails to do justice to the nuances of assembly law.

And Merz’s recent announcement is unlikely to do justice to the nuances of asylum law. He suggested that “around 80 per cent of Syrians currently living in Germany should return to their home country”. Quite apart from whether the grounds for humanitarian protection have actually ceased to exist – or whether such a blanket revocation would even be lawful – SEBASTIAN KORSCH (GER) explains the various residence options still available to Syrian asylum seekers (you may cautiously pick up your glass again at this point – there are, in fact, quite a few.)

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Das Justiz-Projekt: Verwundbarkeit und Resilienz der dritten Gewalt
Friedrich Zillessen, Anna-Mira Brandau & Lennart Laude (Hrsg.)

Wie verwundbar ist die unabhängige und unparteiische Justiz? Welche Hebel haben autoritäre Populisten, Einfluss zu nehmen, Abhängigkeiten zu erzeugen, Schwachstellen auszunutzen? Wir haben untersucht, welche Szenarien denkbar sind – und was sie für die Justiz bedeuten könnten.

Hier verfügbar in Print und digital – natürlich Open Access!

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Meanwhile, the European Committee of Social Rights found that Italy had violated the European Social Charter by defining “essential public services” too broadly in relation to the right to strike. ANGELO JR GOLIA (ENG) explains the Italian genesis of that right.

EU law may have sharper teeth than the European Social Charter, but not in the area of freedom, security and justice, where it leaves gaps to accommodate national orders. The intensifying fight against corruption at the EU level is now creating friction for the primacy of EU law. PHILIPPOS-GEORGIOS KOTSALIS and MARTIN HEGER (ENG) look at the broader picture and argue that in criminal law, primacy of EU law does not operate in the same way as in the internal market.

Another challenge for EU law is generative AI (such as ChatGPT or Grok). Generative AI does not neatly fit under the DSA, complicating the EU Commission’s regulatory reach. MARCO BASSINI and ANDREA PALUMBO (ENG) explain why applying the DSA anyway would be a good idea.

I wish we could now confidently raise our glasses again, but not quite yet. At least there’s birthday cake: the German General Act on Equal Treatment turns 20. But will it finally be brought into line with EU law? After years of debate, a reform proposal is now on the table. ALEXANDER TISCHBIREK (GER) offers a disappointed assessment: “One might have expected a larger cake for such a milestone birthday.”

But now, finally – cheers!

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That’s it for this week. Take care and all the best!

Yours,

the Verfassungsblog Team

If you would like to receive the weekly editorial as an e-mail, you can subscribe here.

The post Cheers, Dear Friends! appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Wie kleinmütig von mir. Viktor Orbán, wie sich herausstellt, kann man sehr wohl abwählen. Sein autoritäres Regime gründete auf der Prämisse, dass seine Partei selbst im Fall ihrer Abwahl die Macht behalten würde, souverän darüber zu bestimmen, wie erfolgreich und wie lange sein Nachfolger regieren kann – eingemauert von lauter Kardinalgesetzen, die nur mit Zweidrittelmehrheit geändert werden können, und von lauter Fidesz-dominierten Institutionen – Präsident, Generalstaatsanwalt, Notenbankchef, Rechnungshof, Verfassungsgericht – die dem Nachfolger in die Parade fahren können, wann immer es Oppositionschef Orbán für nützlich hält, alle mit endlosen Amtszeiten und Zweidrittelmehrheit gewählt. So würde ihm selbst im Fall einer Wahlniederlage nichts Schlimmeres passieren, als dass er seinen Nachfolger ein Jahr oder zwei lauter Misserfolge anhäufen lassen muss, bevor er dann zur Erleichterung aller schließlich Neuwahlen herbeiführt und triumphal und als untadeliger Demokrat an die Macht zurückkehrt. Diese Prämisse gilt, solange der Nachfolger nicht seinerseits jene Zweidrittelmehrheit erringt, der Orbán seine Macht über die Institutionen in the first place verdankt. Gilt sie nicht mehr, fällt das ganze Konstrukt in sich zusammen. Das zu prognostizieren hatte mein demokratisches Gottvertrauen nicht ausgereicht. Mein Fehler. Wer mit mir darauf anstoßen möchte, nur zu! Es ist genügend Sekt da.

Schaut auf Ungarn! Seit eineinhalb Jahrzehnten predigt der Verfassungsblog im Grunde in immer neuen Varianten diesen Satz. „Hier entsteht ein Regime, das im Namen der nationalen Einheit Demokratie, Recht und Verfassung dazu einsetzt, ihre Macht zu zementieren.“ Das schrieb ich am 22. Januar 2011. Auf den Tag genau morgen (Samstag) vor 15 Jahren wurde Orbáns neue Verfassung verkündet. Kurz davor fuhr ich nach Budapest und schrieb einen Bericht für die FAZ. Ich sprach mit ungarischen Verfassungsexpert*innen, viele von ihnen wurden dann regelmäßige Autor*innen bei uns. Mit Christian Boulanger organisierte ich Unterschriften für einen Protestaufruf, der in der ZEIT erschien. Mit Alexandra Kemmerer und Christoph Möllers dachte ich mir das Format des Blogsymposiums aus und erprobte es im Februar 2012 an dem von Armin von Bogdandy und seinem Team kreierten „Rettungsschirm für Grundrechte“, den die EU im Fall eines konstitutionellen Totalversagens in einem Mitgliedstaat – sprich: Ungarn – über ihren Bürger*innen aufspannen können sollte. Ungarn informierte meinen Blick auf die PiS-Herrschaft in Polen 2015-2023, auf Boris Johnson und Donald Trump, auf einen großen Teil dessen, was in der Welt passiert ist und auf dem Verfassungsblog Thema war seither. Ungarn war ein maßgeblicher Treiber für die Entwicklung dieses Projekts weg von dem journalistischen Ein-Mann-Onlinetagebuch der Anfangsjahre und hin zu der transnationalen rechtswissenschaftlichen Diskursplattform, die der Verfassungsblog heute ist.

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Mapping Article 13: Academic and Scientific Freedom under the EU Charter
Vasiliki Kosta & Marie Müller-Elmau (eds.)

Academic freedom is under pressure. Though protected by Article 13 of the EU Charter, academic freedom in the context of EU law received practically no or very little attention. As legal and political developments accelerate, the meaning of this right is taking shape in real time. This edited volume puts Article 13 of the EU Charter in the spotlight and reflects its potential in light of past and present threats to academic freedom.

Discover the potential of Article 13 EU Charter in protecting academic freedom here!

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Und jetzt ist dieser Spuk vorbei. Das ist das Entscheidende. Ob Péter Magyars Tisza-Partei von ihrer Zweidrittelmehrheit besseren Gebrauch machen wird als Viktor Orbáns Fidesz-Partei von der ihren, kann man hoffen, aber nicht wissen. Viel wichtiger ist aber für den Augenblick, dass der Spuk vorbei ist mitsamt dem fettigen, grinsenden Gangsterregime, das ihn sechzehn Jahre lang aufgeführt hat. Die Erzählung, dass dieses Regime den magischen Trick beherrscht, den demokratischen Kuchen sowohl haben als auch ihn autokratisch verspeisen zu können, ohne dass dagegen irgendjemand rechtlich oder politisch effektiv etwas ausrichten kann – diese Erzählung ist widerlegt. Das ist das Entscheidende.

Und darauf erhebe ich mein Glas. Prost, ihr Lieben! Der Spuk hat ein Ende, dieser spezielle Spuk jedenfalls. Was haben wir nicht alles gelernt von und durch und über ihn. Was haben wir nicht alles begriffen. Was ist Populismus? Das da, was die in Ungarn machen. Prost, lieber Jan-Werner Müller! Ungarn als Ur-Frankenstate, als Archetyp des autoritären Legalismus. Prost, liebe Kim Scheppele! Prost, all ihr Scholactivists und Rule-of-Law-Zeloten und Verfassungskassandren in Budapest, Wien, Berlin, Princeton, Warschau, Florenz, wo immer ihr seid! Mit euch will ich diesen Moment genießen.

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Editor’s Pick

von JAKOB GAŠPERIN WISCHHOFF

Die preisgekrönte Dokumentation Mr. Nobody Against Putin (derzeit auf arte abrufbar) spielt tief im ländlichen Russland, in Karabasch, das weithin als die am stärksten verschmutzte Stadt der Welt gilt. Der örtliche Lehrer Pasha liebt seinen Beruf und bietet seinen Schüler:innen einen geschützten Raum für Diskussionen und Kreativität – und ist auch dafür zuständig, Schulveranstaltungen zu filmen. Als der Krieg in der Ukraine beginnt, dringt die Propaganda in jeden Winkel des Schulalltags ein– die Schüler:innen lernen zu marschieren, und Mitschüler und Brüder werden an die Front einzogen. Viele kehren nicht zurück. Pasha bleibt seinen Prinzipien treu und kündigt seine Stelle. Doch dann erkennt er, dass er der Mann mit der Kamera ist – eine ideale Position, um die Absurdität und Verdorbenheit dieser Kriegspropaganda in den Schulen zu dokumentieren.

Während sich alles verändert und Russland für Pasha zu gefährlich wird, muss er seine graue Industriestadt mit ihren Schornsteinen verlassen, die er aufrichtig liebt. Er nimmt seine Aufnahmen mit – das Ergebnis ist dieser Dokumentarfilm, der in Russland inzwischen als extremistische und terroristische Propaganda verboten ist. Die Geschichte hat mich durch ihre Schlichtheit und Menschlichkeit berührt. Sie zeigt, mit welchem absurden Aufwand die Vulnerabelsten in der Gesellschaft indoktriniert werden.

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Die Woche auf dem Verfassungsblog

zusammengefasst von EVA MARIA BREDLER

Es ist tatsächlich passiert. Orbán wurde abgewählt! Ich möchte die Sektstimmung wirklich nur ungern stören, aber ich fürchte, ich muss trotzdem meinen Job machen. Deshalb hier eine kurze Unterbrechung mit den wichtigsten Entwicklungen (ein paar gute sind auch dabei, versprochen!).

Die TISZA-Partei unter der Führung von Péter Magyar hat in Ungarn eine verfassungsändernde Mehrheit erreicht. Das Ergebnis ermöglicht es zwar, eine neue Verfassung zu schaffen, doch TÍMEA DRINÓCZI (EN) warnt: Ohne breite Legitimation bestehe die Gefahr, die Muster des vorherigen Regimes zu reproduzieren.

Für BARBARA ZELLER (EN) wird der Wahlsieg von einem verfassungsrechtlichen Dilemma überschattet: Darf man die Verfassung missachten, um Demokratie und Rechtsstaatlichkeit wiederherzustellen? Sie plädiert für verfassungsrechtlichen Ungehorsam und meint, dass dieser nicht nur gerechtfertigt, sondern zur Wahrung materieller Werte sogar rechtlich geboten sein kann.

Sollte es Ungarn tatsächlich gelingen, die Demokratie wieder aufzubauen, müsste das Land endlich nicht mehr als Paradebeispiel für Autoritarismus in Europa herhalten. Doch so weit sind wir noch nicht. GIUSEPPE MARTINICO und UMBERTO LATTANZI (EN) nutzen die Situation daher, um die in Italien vom Wahlvolk abgelehnte Justizreform mit Ungarn zu kontrastieren. Ihr Fazit: Italien mag ein politisches System mit erheblichen Problemen sein, ist aber weit vom undemokratischen ungarischen Beispiel entfernt.

Jetzt bitte kurz das Glas abstellen: Das ecuadorianische Verfassungsgericht steht erneut unter Druck durch die Regierung von Präsident Noboa. ANDREAS GUTMANN, DIEGO NÚÑEZ SANTAMARÍA und ALEX VALLE FRANCO (EN) zeichnen einen umfassenderen Konflikt um verfassungsrechtliche Grenzen in einem System nach, in dem die meisten Kontrollinstitutionen bereits auf die Exekutive ausgerichtet sind.

Ähnlich besorgniserregend ist die Lage in Brasilien: Der Banco-Master-Skandal hat offengelegt, wie Intransparenz und Interessenkonflikte das Oberste Gericht untergraben können. JULIANO ZAIDEN BENVINDO und MIGUEL GODOY (EN) ziehen Parallelen zu Indien, wo es 2018 zu einer sehr ähnlichen institutionellen Krise kam.

Indien hat währenddessen in einem übereilten Gesetzgebungsverfahren einen neuen Trans Rights Act verabschiedet. SARTHAK GUPTA (EN) warnt, dass das Gesetz die Anerkennung von Geschlechtsidentität zur Sache staatlicher Überprüfung mache – mit erheblichen Folgen für verfassungsrechtlich geschützte Rechte.

Staatliche Überprüfung geht zu weit, doch im Alltag sind wir natürlich alle auf Expertise angewiesen und vertrauen auf Autoritäten: Ärzt*innen, Anwält*innen, Ingenieur*innen usw. In seiner Entscheidung zur Konversionstherapie hat der US Supreme Court solche professionelle Beratung nun als geschützte Meinungsäußerung eingeordnet. Für CLAUDIA E. HAUPT und ROBERT POST (EN) droht dies den rechtlichen Rahmen zu untergraben, der qualifizierte professionelle Beratung überhaupt erst möglich macht.

Auch in Deutschland werden demokratische Grundrechte gegen queere Personen mobilisiert: Die Landesdirektion Sachsen hat dem CSD-Straßenfest in Dresden die Versammlungseigenschaft abgesprochen. Ein falsches Zeichen zur falschen Zeit, meint JASPER SIEGERT (DE) – und zeigt, warum die Entscheidung den Feinheiten des Versammlungsrechts nicht gerecht wird.

Den Feinheiten des Asylrechts dürfte dagegen Merz’ jüngste Ankündigung nicht gerecht werden, wonach „rund 80 Prozent der in Deutschland jetzt sich aufhaltenden Syrerinnen und Syrer zurück in ihr Heimatland kehren“ sollen. Unabhängig davon, ob der Grund für humanitären Schutz überhaupt entfallen ist und ein pauschaler Widerruf möglich wäre, erklärt SEBASTIAN KORSCH (DE), welche Aufenthaltsmöglichkeiten es für syrische Schutzsuchende gibt (jetzt dürfen Sie das Sektglas vorsichtig wieder in die Hand nehmen, denn es gibt tatsächlich einige solcher Möglichkeiten).

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Das Justiz-Projekt: Verwundbarkeit und Resilienz der dritten Gewalt
Friedrich Zillessen, Anna-Mira Brandau & Lennart Laude (Hrsg.)

Wie verwundbar ist die unabhängige und unparteiische Justiz? Welche Hebel haben autoritäre Populisten, Einfluss zu nehmen, Abhängigkeiten zu erzeugen, Schwachstellen auszunutzen? Wir haben untersucht, welche Szenarien denkbar sind – und was sie für die Justiz bedeuten könnten.

Hier verfügbar in Print und digital – natürlich Open Access!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Währenddessen stellte der Europäische Ausschuss für soziale Rechte fest, dass Italien gegen die Europäische Sozialcharta verstieß, indem es „wesentliche öffentliche Dienste“ im Zusammenhang mit dem Streikrecht zu weit gefasst hat. ANGELO JR GOLIA (EN) erläutert die Entstehungsgeschichte dieses Rechts für Italien.

Das Unionsrecht mag mehr Zähne haben als die Sozialcharta – nicht jedoch im Raum der Freiheit, der Sicherheit und des Rechts, wo es bewusst Spielräume für nationale Ordnungen lässt. Der verstärkte Kampf gegen Korruption auf EU-Ebene führt nun zu Spannungen mit dem Vorrang des Unionsrechts. PHILIPPOS-GEORGIOS KOTSALIS und MARTIN HEGER (EN) ordnen dies ein und argumentieren, dass der Vorrang im Strafrecht anders wirkt als im Binnenmarkt.

Eine weitere Herausforderung für das Unionsrecht ist generative KI (wie ChatGPT oder Grok). Sie passt nicht ohne Weiteres unter den Digital Services Act – was es der EU-Kommission erschwert, regulatorisch einzugreifen. MARCO BASSINI und ANDREA PALUMBO (EN) erklären, warum es dennoch sinnvoll wäre, den DSA anzuwenden.

Ich würde jetzt gern wieder zum Toast anheben – aber noch nicht ganz. Immerhin gibt es Kuchen: Das Allgemeine Gleichbehandlungsgesetz wird 20. Doch wird es auch endlich unionsrechtskonform? Nach jahrelangem Ringen gibt es nun einen Reformvorschlag. ALEXANDER TISCHBIREK (DE) stellt enttäuscht fest: „Man hätte dem AGG zu seinem runden Geburtstag schon eine etwas größere Torte backen können.“

Jetzt aber: hoch die Gläser!

*

Das war’s für diese Woche.

Ihnen alles Gute!

Ihr

Verfassungsblog-Team

Wenn Sie das wöchentliche Editorial als E-Mail zugesandt bekommen wollen, können Sie es hier bestellen.

The post Prost, ihr Lieben! appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

The decision

On 2 April 2026, the CED adopted a decision invoking, for the first time, the mechanism under Article 34 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (“the Convention”) to bring the situation of a State Party to the attention of the General Assembly. The aim of the decision is for the General Assembly to consider measures designed to support the country in the prevention, investigation, punishment and eradication of this crime.

The CED did not find sufficiently substantiated evidence of a single federal policy deliberately aimed at committing enforced disappearances, whether by action or omission, within the meaning of the Rome Statute (para. 118). Nonetheless, it did conclude that there is sufficient basis to maintain that enforced disappearances have been committed through widespread or systematic attacks, conceived and carried out by organisations or with the complicity, participation or acquiescence of public authorities at the municipal, state and federal levels (paras. 64–66).

The reception of the decision in Mexico

The decision was rejected by the Mexican government, which challenged the CED’s interpretation (including on a personal level), defended recent regulatory and institutional progress, and emphasised that the CED itself had ruled out the existence of a federal policy aimed at the commission of enforced disappearances. The State has advocated a restrictive interpretation of the Convention, arguing that enforced disappearances are those attributable to state agents or, at most, to private individuals with demonstrable acquiescence under a very strict standard; most cases, by contrast, would fall within the scope of common criminal violence. In its 2025 response and its public statement of April 2026, the government insisted that Article 34 was designed for contexts in which disappearances are committed in a widespread and systematic manner by State agents, and further emphasised that the CED itself had ruled out the existence of a federal policy of attacks against the civilian population.

At the same time, the Mexican government calls for recognition of the reforms undertaken, such as the enactment of specific legislation, the establishment of specialised institutions, search mechanisms and databases. The CED has acknowledged on several occasions that regulatory progress has been made; the problem is that such progress has been insufficient and ineffective in altering the structural trends of the phenomenon. The CED clearly states that, despite the efforts made, the situation has not improved since the 2021 visit, that the authorities remain overwhelmed by the scale of the crime, and that structural changes are still needed to tackle it effectively (para. 120).

Victim groups approved the CED decision and criticised the state’s position. What the state’s official response overlooks is that even cases in which the killings were physically carried out by members of organised crime take place within a context of structural impunity, institutional fragmentation and a crisis in the forensic system. This is precisely why we must ask: what kind of responsibility arises when a disappearance cannot be directly attributed to the state, yet cannot be dismissed as merely a matter of ‘organised crime’?

The dispute over acquiescence

The CED’s response suggests that the appropriate framework is one of complex responsibility, comprising direct action in some cases, collusion in others, and structural tolerance in many more. That is why acquiescence is now the decisive category for understanding Mexico. Although there is no definition in the convention and other international treaties, traditionally acquiescence has been understood as “thus consent inferred from a juridically relevant silence or inaction”.

However, in March 2023, the CED adopted the Statement on Non-State Actors, giving a definition as follows:

“5. ‘Acquiescence’ means that the State knew, had reasons to know or ought to have known of the commission or of the real and imminent risk of commission of enforced disappearance by persons or groups of persons, but that one of the following applies:

a) The State has either accepted, tolerated or given consent to this situation, even implicitly;

b) The State has deliberately and in full knowledge, by action or omission, failed to take measures to prevent the crime and to investigate and punish the perpetrators;

c) The State has acted in connivance with the perpetrators or with total disregard for the situation of the potential victims, facilitating the actions of the non-State actors who commit the act;

d) The State has created the conditions that allowed their commission

6. In particular, there is acquiescence within the meaning of article 2 when there is a known pattern of disappearance of persons and the State has failed to take the measures necessary to prevent further cases of disappearance and to investigate the perpetrators and bring them to justice.”

On the other hand, since 1988, the Interamerican Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has recognized acquiescence as “the lack of due diligence to prevent the violation” (Velásquez Rodríguez vs. Honduras, para. 172) and, in 2009, the IACtHR condemned Mexico, arguing that “the State was aware that there was a real and immediate risk […] it failed to demonstrate that it had taken reasonable measures” (González et al. vs. México, para. 283 ff.)

That is why, in this case, acquiescence should be understood as the legally relevant tolerance or tacit consent of the State in the face of deprivation of liberty and concealment carried out by non-state actors. It is the legal term for describing a reality in which the boundary between omission, tolerance, collusion and participation is, in practice, blurred.

The CED noted that many of the complaints received describe patterns in which public authorities have been directly involved or in which non-state actors have operated with their support or acquiescence (paras. 64–66); furthermore, it maintained that, even under the restrictive interpretation advocated by Mexico, several of the situations examined could fall within a framework of prior knowledge, manifest state conduct and tacit consent (para. 62). And the CED had already clarified, since its 2021 visit, that this responsibility encompasses contexts in which criminal organisations operate with the support of officials, under their de facto control, or within a known pattern of disappearances against which the State fails to take effective measures to prevent the recurrence of harm or to investigate it seriously.

The seriousness of the situation lies in the fact that the CED, given the scale and severity of the events, considers these to be crimes against humanity. The official response fails to dispel a fundamental doubt: if the State maintains that the problem lies with criminal structures outside its federal policy, it should be particularly willing to accept mechanisms for cooperation, technical assistance and international investigation.

Security-sector and institutional reform

The forensic crisis, the proliferation of mass graves and the fact that families continue to carry out search functions that should fall to the State constitute the first major area in which international support could prove decisive. The CED has repeatedly highlighted the inadequacy of records, the lack of reliable data, the insufficiency of forensic services and the need to distinguish between enforced disappearances and other cases (paras. 47 ff.). It has warned of the number of unidentified bodies and graves that remain without adequate attention and emphasised the persistence of the phenomenon and the failure to prioritise criminal investigations (paras. 21 ff.). A potential resolution by the General Assembly could therefore provide technical and financial support to improve administrative capacity, to restore traceability, strengthen evidentiary systems and reduce the burden that has been displaced onto victims’ families.

This support could be translated into a request to the Secretary-General and Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to design a technical assistance package for Mexico focused on search, forensic identification and investigation, such as the recent UN work on missing persons. It could invite Member States, UN agencies and specialised bodies to provide material and financial assistance as well as technical cooperation; it could call for the creation or strengthening of an integrated national search and information system using the CED’s Guiding Principles.

A second area of opportunity is the review of the public security model. The CED reiterated the close correlation between the increase in disappearances since 2006 and the ‘war on drugs’ policy, characterised by the deployment of armed forces in security operations. Without equating that policy with a federal policy of enforced disappearance, the CED identifies it as part of the structural context that facilitated the expansion of the phenomenon (para. 88). The point is that militarisation contributed to an institutional environment marked by opportunities for abuse, collusion and concealment. Any serious response to the CED’s decision therefore requires a reassessment of the security model itself, including civilian control, oversight mechanisms, documentation duties and the effective subordination of security operations to civil legal accountability.

A third issue is Mexico’s institutional coordination problem. The creation of specialised institutions and legislation has not by itself altered the structural conditions of impunity. Fragmentation among municipal, state and federal authorities continues to disperse responsibility, obstruct coordination and allow each level of government to shift blame onto another. The CED points to multiple forms of state implication across different institutional levels (para. 62), that is why a reform should address how responsibilities are distributed, coordinated, supervised and enforced across the State apparatus as a whole.

Conclusion

The central analytical point is now clear: the significance of the CED’s decision lies in identifying a broader structure of responsibility in which direct action, collusion, participation and acquiescence coexist across different levels of the State. For that reason, the government’s insistence that no such federal policy exists is no longer a sufficient response. The real issue is whether Mexico is prepared to confront a pattern of disappearances sustained by structural impunity, institutional fragmentation and legally relevant forms of tolerance that cannot be dismissed as the work of “organised crime” alone.

Mexico now faces a specific political choice. It can persist in a defensive strategy centred on contesting the CED’s interpretation, narrowing the scope of attribution and protecting the State’s institutional narrative. Or it can accept that the Committee’s decision opens a necessary space for international cooperation, technical assistance and deeper structural reform in the fields of investigation, forensic capacity, public security and accountability. The former path would preserve official discourse; the latter would begin to address the conditions that have allowed the crime to endure.

What is ultimately at stake is not the credibility of the State’s self-depiction, but the rights of those who continue to search for the disappeared, identify bodies, preserve evidence and demand truth in the absence of effective institutional answers. A response that remains focused primarily on institutional defence risks deepening the very conditions that have forced victims and their families to bear, almost alone, the burden of disappearance.

The post Mexico Between Acquiescence and the Politics of Denial appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Noelia Castillo vs. Abogados Cristianos

Noelia Castillo hat am 26. März 2026 in einem Krankenhaus in der Provinz Barcelona ayuda para morir, übersetzt als „Sterbehilfe“, in Anspruch genommen; ihr wurde auf ausdrücklichen Wunsch eine tödliche Spritze verabreicht. Ihrem Tod war ein fast zweijähriger Rechtsstreit vor spanischen Gerichten einschließlich dem spanischen Verfassungsgericht sowie vor dem EGMR vorangegangen, in dem ihr Vater versucht hatte, die Sterbehilfe zu verhindern. Dabei wurde er durch Abogados Cristianos, „Die christlichen Anwälte“, vertreten – letztlich ohne Erfolg.

Die bei ihrem Tod 25-jährige Castillo war seit einem Suizidversuch im Oktober 2022 querschnittsgelähmt und litt unter starken chronischen Schmerzen. Die zuständige staatliche Kommission genehmigte ihren Antrag auf Sterbehilfe einstimmig. Insbesondere wegen ihres jungen Alters und psychischer Leiden, die jedoch Experten zufolge nicht ihre Freiverantwortlichkeit ausgeschlossen haben sollen, sowie der großen Aufmerksamkeit, die das Verfahren, angestrengt durch den eigenen Vater und Abogados Cristianos, mit sich brachte, hat der Fall große Wellen geschlagen. In ganz Spanien haben sich Menschen teils für Castillos Selbstbestimmungsrecht, teils für den Erhalt ihres Lebens – auch gegen ihren Willen – eingesetzt.

Das spanische Gesetz zur Regulierung der ayuda para morir

Die ayuda para morir – wie sie Castillo erhalten hat – ist in Spanien seit dem Erlass der Ley Orgánica 3/2021, de 24 de marzo, de regulación de la eutanasia (kurz: LORE), dem „Organgesetz über die Regulierung der eutanasia“¹⁾ unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen legal. Das Gesetz reguliert die Sterbehilfe umfassend als eine Leistung des öffentlichen Gesundheitssystems.

Gemäß Art. 3g LORE umfasst die ayuda para morir sowohl Handlungen, die im deutschen Recht als Suizidassistenz verstanden werden (auto-administración), als auch solche, die im deutschen Recht als Tötung auf Verlangen (administración directa al paciente de una sustancia por parte del profesional sanitario competente) eingeordnet werden und nach § 216 StGB strafbewehrt sind. Die LORE regelt ein umfassendes Verfahren mit Anträgen an einen zuständigen und an einen beratenden Arzt und einer obligatorischen Genehmigung durch eine regionale Garantie- und Evaluationskommission einschließlich Fristenregelungen. Kapitel 4 der LORE sieht eine Garantie des Zugangs zum Verfahren vor und ermöglicht ein Beschwerdeverfahren, wenn (1) der zuständige oder der beratende Arzt oder (2) die Kommission den Antrag ablehnt. Im ersten Fall ist für die Beschwerde die Kommission zuständig, im zweiten Fall der Verwaltungsrechtsweg eröffnet (Art. 7, 8.4, 10 LORE). Die gesetzlichen Regelungen werden durch einen umfassenden Leitfaden zur korrekten Umsetzung des Gesetzes ergänzt.

Während in Deutschland das Bundesverfassungsgericht – wie Christoph Goos hier im Verfassungsblog bereits schrieb – das Verfassungsrecht auf selbstbestimmtes Sterben „nicht auf schwere oder unheilbare Krankheitszustände oder bestimmte Lebens- und Krankheitsphasen beschränkt“, begrenzt die LORE das aus ihr hervorgehende Leistungsrecht auf contextos eutanásicos, also auf „euthanasische Kontexte“. Diese liegen laut dem Gesetz vor, wenn der Anspruchsteller von einer schweren, unheilbaren Krankheit oder einem schweren, chronischen und behindernden Leiden betroffen ist (Präambel in Verbindung mit Art. 5.1 d LORE).

Die spanische LORE stellt damit im internationalen Vergleich des Rechts am Lebensende eine der jüngeren legislativen Entwicklungen dar. Aufgrund ihrer Beschränkung auf contextos eutanásicos ist sie einerseits relativ restriktiv, andererseits jedoch mit ihrer starken Zugangsgarantie und der Verankerung der Leistung in der öffentlichen Gesundheitsversorgung äußerst progressiv. Zwischen dem Inkrafttreten des Gesetzes am 25. Juni 2021 und dem 31. Dezember 2024 wurden insgesamt 2.432 Anfragen registriert, von denen 1.123 stattgegeben worden ist (siehe Jahresbericht des spanischen Gesundheitsministeriums aus 2025). 46,01 % der Fälle aus 2024, in denen Sterbehilfe geleistet wurde, lag eine neurologische Erkrankung zugrunde, in 28,17 % war es eine onkologische Erkrankung. Das Durchschnittsalter lag bei 69,74 Jahren.

Die Urteile des spanischen Verfassungsgerichts aus 2023

Auch das spanische Verfassungsgericht hat sich mit der Sterbehilfe befasst. Es hat in zwei vieldiskutierten Entscheidungen aus 2023 die Verfassungsmäßigkeit der LORE bestätigt, nachdem Vertreter der Parlamentsfraktionen von VOX (Urteil 19/2023) und der Partido Popular (Urteil 94/2023) dieses im Rahmen von Verfassungsbeschwerden angegriffen hatten. Im Rahmen dieser Entscheidung hat das spanische Verfassungsgericht erstmalig das spanische Pendant zum deutschen „Recht auf selbstbestimmtes Sterben“ aus der Verfassung hergeleitet, das es als das „Recht auf Selbstbestimmung hinsichtlich des eigenen Todes in contextos eutanásicos“ bezeichnet. Genauso wie der einfache Gesetzgeber das Leistungsrecht auf Sterbehilfe aus der LORE auf contextos eutanásicos beschränkt hat, beschränkt also auch das spanische Verfassungsgericht das entsprechende Grundrecht auf diese Krankheits- und Leidenskontexte. Das Gericht verankert dieses Recht in den Grundrechten auf physische und moralische Integrität (Art. 15 der spanischen Verfassung (CE)) – dort insbesondere die persönliche Integrität – in Verbindung mit den Prinzipien der Würde und der freien Entfaltung der Persönlichkeit (Art. 10.1 CE). „In solchen Extremsituationen“ betreffe die Entscheidung über das eigene Sterben „unübertrefflich intensiv“ die genannten Grundrechte, so das Verfassungsgericht (F.6.C.d)ii)). Damit verankert das Gericht das „neue“ Grundrecht zwar ähnlich wie das Bundesverfassungsgericht, schränkt es jedoch kontextuell ein, ohne diese Einschränkung positiv zu begründen.

Individuelle Selbstbestimmung und die Rechte Dritter

Der Fall Noelia Castillo hat die Frage aufgeworfen, ob Familienangehörige – hier ihr Vater – eine erteilte Genehmigung für Sterbehilfe gerichtlich angreifen dürfen. Der Vater Castillos hatte beim spanischen Verfassungsgericht Beschwerde gegen die Entscheidung des Obersten Gerichtshofs Kataloniens eingelegt, in der das katalanische Gericht die Freigabe der Sterbehilfe für Castillo bestätigt hatte (siehe zur Chronologie hier). Das spanische Verfassungsgericht hat seine Beschwerde jedoch wegen des „offensichtlichen Mangels einer Verletzung eines durch Verfassungsbeschwerde schützbaren Grundrechts“ ohne weitere Begründung zurückgewiesen. Auch das Grundgesetz verleiht Dritten keine Rechte, den Gebrauch dieses höchstpersönlichen Rechts auf Selbstbestimmung in Frage zu stellen. Der EGMR hat sein Begehren auf Erlass einstweiliger Maßnahmen abgelehnt. Dies zeigt eindrücklich, welche Grenzen die spanische Verfassungsrechtsordnung – aber auch die europäische Menschenrechtsordnung – den Klagemöglichkeiten Dritter setzt, wenn es um die selbstbestimmte Entscheidung über die Beendigung des eigenen Lebens geht.

Beide Entscheidungen spiegeln das Verständnis individueller Selbstbestimmung wider, auf dem die LORE und das spanische Grundrecht auf Selbstbestimmung hinsichtlich des eigenen Todes, aber auch das deutsche Grundrecht auf selbstbestimmtes Sterben fußen. Der Vater Castillos konnte weder eine Verletzung eigener Verfassungsrechte geltend machen, noch auf Rechte seiner volljährigen, nicht für einwilligungsunfähig erklärten Tochter für diese, aber gegen deren Willen berufen. Trotz dieser eindeutigen verfassungsrechtlichen Bewertung wird bald der Oberste Gerichtshof Spaniens in einem Parallelfall darüber entscheiden, ob Dritte – auch dort der Vater eines volljährigen Sterbewilligen – in verwaltungsgerichtlichen Verfahren überhaupt klagebefugt sein können, um die Genehmigung eines Antrags auf Sterbehilfe anzufechten. Der Rechtsstreit um die Eingriffsrechte Dritter in Verfahren zur Sterbehilfe ist also noch nicht zu Ende. Die Odyssee, der sich Castillo ausgesetzt sah, war – so darf man vermuten – nur aufgrund der Unterstützung durch Abogados Cristianos möglich, die sich selbst an Castillos Todestag vor dem Krankenhaus versammelten, in dem sie die Sterbehilfe erhielt.

Ein Weckruf für die deutsche Debatte

Daneben wirft der Fall Castillo in Deutschland ein (erstes) Schlaglicht auf die spanische Rechtslage. Spanien wird zu Recht für sein Vorgehen gegen Gewalt gegen Frauen gelobt, vor allem das spanische Gesetz über umfassende Schutzmaßnahmen gegen genderspezifische Gewalt (siehe den Beitrag von Manuela Niehaus). Nicht nur im Kampf gegen genderspezifische Gewalt kann das spanische Recht jedoch einen wichtigen Beitrag leisten. Die spanische LORE und die entsprechenden Urteile des spanischen Verfassungsgerichts sollten insbesondere den Bundestag interessieren. Mindestens genauso interessant wie das Gesetz und die Rechtsprechung dazu sind die Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse, die spanische Behörden, Praktikerinnen und Patienten seit dem Erlass des Gesetzes im Jahr 2021 gesammelt haben (dazu aus der spanischen Wissenschaft siehe etwa hier und hier).

Mehr als sechs Jahre ist der „Paukenschlag“, mit dem das Bundesverfassungsgericht das Verbot der geschäftsmäßigen Förderung der Selbsttötung (§ 217 StGB a.F.) für verfassungswidrig und nichtig erklärt hat, nun her. Und noch immer ist die Suizidassistenz in der Bundesrepublik nicht gesetzlich geregelt. Damit wird weder sichergestellt, dass neben dem Suizidassistenten mindestens eine weitere Person den Fall begutachtet (Vier-Augen-Prinzip), noch wird die Einbindung psychologischer oder psychiatrischer Fachkompetenz in Fällen mit psychischen Erkrankungen verlangt (letztere setzt übrigens auch die LORE nicht voraus). Das ist ein Zustand, der nicht nur aus meiner Sicht (siehe etwa Annika Dießner und Thomas Weigend) den verfassungsrechtlich geschützten Interessen nicht gerecht wird.

Der Fall Castillo ist ein Weckruf für die deutsche Debatte. Dabei dürfen jedoch persönliche Leidensgeschichten wie die von Noelia Castillo nicht durch unsachliche und verkürzte Stellungnahmen und Berichte instrumentalisiert werden, um politische oder ideologische Kämpfe auszufechten. Der Bundestag muss mehr als sechs Jahre nach der Aufhebung des § 217 StGB einen politischen Kompromiss finden, der sowohl dem Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Sterbewilligen als auch der staatlichen Pflicht zum Schutz des Lebens gerecht wird und sollte dabei aus den Erfahrungen der Nachbarländer lernen. Es bleibt abzuwarten, ob (und wie) sich erste Meldungen zu einer neuen Gesetzesinitiative zur Regulierung der Suizidassistenz verdichten.

The post Sterben mit Regeln appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Stephen Skowronek

This post continues and completes my responses to comments in the Balkinization symposium on my book The Adaptability Paradox.

Democracy: The Adaptability Paradox argues that what we have yet to create, and what we desperately need, is a strong constitution capable of supporting a fully inclusive democracy. (TAP: x, 236) This is not the standard view of the problem of democracy in America. The standard view is far more focused on the limitations of our democracy than on the limitations of our Constitution. The emphasis has been on democracy’s uneven progress, on its incomplete realization, and on overcoming its still-potent adversaries in American culture and politics. I did not write this book to take issue with the standard approach. In fact, the insights it has generated are integral to my analysis. But I don’t think that all of democracy’s problems can be solved by more democracy. I shifted the focus to the impact of democratization on the Constitution because I think that the constitutional problem of managing conflict and supporting democracy often gets lost in “bottom-up” treatments.

Some are uncomfortable with this shift in focus. Emily Zackin thinks that I am “blaming inclusion” for “blowing up” the Constitution when I should “lay the blame” at the feet of those who opposed it. I knew going in that some readers might find the approach I adopt in this book unduly detached from the highly charged issues it grapples with (TAP: ix), but this reading is over the top. I am not “blaming” inclusion. I am not suggesting that democratization was ill-advised or unwarranted or mistaken in any way. My claim is that inclusion had profound consequences for our constitutional system. Expanding rights in the 1960s broke the federalism barrier. In respect to both rights and structure, it tested the ordering capacities of our Constitution. The blame game is a distraction from a candid examination of the results of that test. I harbor no nostalgia for the constitutional arrangements that the rights revolution upended and transformed. Nor do I have any sympathy for the new politics of exclusion (aka “backsliding”) that has taken hold in recent years. I am raising questions that I think all committed democrats would do well to consider: Is this Constitution still serviceable for the democracy we have become?  Will “more democracy,” by itself, suffice to make it work better? Why can’t we find another mutually acceptable formula for governing?

My thesis is not, as Emily would have it, that we have had “too much” adaptation. I agree with her that we have not “had enough” to support a fully inclusive democracy. Indeed, that is my point. We have been waiting for some fifty years for that old ace in the hole to reveal itself once again, and the problems of governing this more inclusive democracy have only deepened in the interim. My concern is whether an adaptation of that old instrument for this purpose is still in the cards.

I have always been skeptical of the choice between a top-down and a bottom-up perspective. This book looks both ways. As Richard Pildes says, it eyes “the relationship between institutional structures and political culture.” I give special attention to how this relationship has changed in America over time. At its darkest, the book wonders whether direct engagement with the diversity of the American people in full is more than this Constitution can handle. The speculation is that at a certain threshold of inclusion, it may become impossible for Americans to reestablish a common sense of that old instrument. The authority to say what is essential to it and what is consistent with it may dissipate.

My response to this problem is not that we should roll back our democracy. It is that we should reconsider our Constitution. (Rogers Smith’s comment goes further, suggesting that we reconsider the sovereignty of nation-states more generally.) At a dinner a while back, Sandy Levinson asked me whether I thought that Madison has been proven wrong and that Montesquieu was right after all. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but perhaps that is what we are witnessing. An “extended republic” may ultimately become so diverse that it fails in its original purpose, no longer providing the security needed by the interests it encompasses to get them to engage in a common project and make their national government work.

Emily is not alone. Elizabeth Beaumont too thinks I am targeting inclusion. I appreciate the queasiness. I share the unease. But I hope that readers will direct a share of their unease to the developmental dilemma I am trying to bring into view. That is what Andrea Katz does. Although Andrea says that I see “too much inclusion” as the problem, the thrust of her comment is quite attentive to the issues I am raising. Like me, she is worried that our confidence in American democracy may be fading. At the heart of that problem, she sees a lack of trust and a weakening of faith in American institutions – in “Congress, elections, and the basic legitimacy of outcomes.” The Adaptability Paradox draws out the connection between a people’s faith in their institutions and their trust in one another. It suggests that we won’t get anywhere if we don’t rebuild those linkages.

Andrea points to the reformers of the Progressive era as a model. So would I. Though many have (justly) criticized the Progressives for the limits of their democratic vision, those reformers did, to their credit, see clearly that greater inclusiveness must go hand in hand with a reconstruction of the Constitution. Both were necessary to create a stable and secure democracy for industrial America. I come down harder on the heirs to Progressivism, the “new class” of the 60s and 70s. I don’t criticize the new class for advancing the cause of inclusion. My beef is that they failed to give the same sustained attention to the other part of the problem: reconstructing the state in a way that might sustain their new democracy. Though their democratizing reforms were radically changing the conditions for constitutional government in America, the new class never came up with a coherent formula or and politically compelling program for reordering it. That shortcoming opened them up to escalating broadsides that charged them with undermining constitutional government. Worse yet, it allowed implacable opponents to seize for themselves the cause of restoring constitutional government. This was an elite failure, a failure to see that a fully inclusive democracy would not hold together by itself.

My emphasis throughout on reconstructing the state and inventing new management tools for American democracy may rub my friends on the left the wrong way. It may seem too top-down. But I wonder if we are not due for a reawakening of concern on the left for management tools and institutional intermediation. As the old song goes “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til its gone.” After the rights revolution, the friends of democracy did not just discount the importance of party management and administrative management; they actively contributed to the drive to hollow those tools out. More than that, they failed to generate new intermediaries potent enough to take their place. Their ambivalence toward the state left their new democracy vulnerable.

I am all for “institutional designers,” like Richard Pildes, who put institutional reform and a reconfiguration of political processes front and center. Ideas about how to fix the state are now proliferating rapidly. Still, we have yet to do what the Progressives did. Our commitment to a new state for a new democracy has yet to be coupled to a potent social movement for good government. Short of that, I fear that current efforts to rethink our institutional arrangements will remain scattered, and that rather than guiding collective action, they will remain talking points.

****

Scope and Causation: As Andrea observes, Trumpism has exposed the fragility of our democracy and the immediacy of the threat to basic constitutional protections. Our constitutional problem has become glaring. The Adaptability Paradox does not pay special attention to Trump, but it does try to make sense of this shocking new reality. To that end, the book zeros in on the politics of constitutional adjustment and its prior history.

For several of the commentators in this symposium that focus seems too narrow to account for the situation at hand. Jeremy Kessler asks: what about capitalism? Rogers Smith asks: what about empire? Richard Pildes asks: what about the churning dissatisfaction evident across Western democracies regardless of their institutional structures?

There are indeed many different factors one might consider in accounting for the current predicament. I lay claim to one largely unattended piece of the puzzle. Moreover, I believe that my explanation has special value if Americans are going to do something constructive about the predicament in which they find themselves. Wider frames of analysis may absorb, even dissolve, the concerns raised in this book, but they can also absolve us of responsibility for taking a closer look at ourselves and the problems we as a people will have to overcome.

Giving that point a different twist, I would also suggest that dwelling on the global forces in which we have gotten caught up can be incapacitating. Conversely, recovering America’s long history of constitutional reinvention can be empowering. Note that, though of some commentators in this symposium take issue with my analysis as too “top down” and too cynical about democracy, Jeremy scores it for its “voluntarism” and “idealism.” I was also struck in this regard by Richard’s confession that he remains “of two minds” about the culture-and-institutions approach. I take heart from that ambivalence. I wonder Richard he persists in his own work of conjuring new institutional designs, because he too recognizes that, as a practical matter, solutions are likely to come from actions taken by people in particular places working through institutional and cultural contexts with histories of their own.

Instead of presenting America as just another case of a worldwide churning, I choose quite deliberately to offer a different set of comparisons. That puts me on a separate page, but I don’t think it reads me out of the bigger stories. I would suggest that my more parochial comparisons back to earlier periods in American history are not without significance for those, like Richard, who juxtapose them against a more cosmopolitan view. As it happens, I recently sketched an argument along those lines in another forum, one that Richard hosts.[1]

Why, we might ask, does the United States now seem to be leading the world-wide slide into more authoritarian styles of rule, when it resisted a similar slide in the 1930s? The simple answer is that America in the 1930s happened to be led by a president committed to democracy’s advance. But on inspection, the answer is anything but simple.

At the outset of his second term, Franklin Roosevelt opened a multifront assault against the institutional constraints on presidential power. He proposed to subordinate the judiciary to presidential will, to build a personal party based on loyalty to his program, and to extend his control over the administrative power created by his New Deal. These proposals were all of a piece, architectural elements of a reordering that would displace the Constitution’s multipart, power-sharing scheme with presidentialism. Point for point, they were not all that different from Trump’s designs. And yet, in that earlier episode defenders of the Constitution in both parties coalesced against Roosevelt. They renounced him as a dictator and soundly defeated all three of his initiatives.

That answer, however, is too simple also. The sobering fact is that those faithful constitutionalists of the 1930s were not resisting presidentialism on behalf of democracy. At the heart of the coalition that defeated Roosevelt were southern racists determined to shield authoritarian forms of rule in their home states from what they saw as the threat posed by unbridled presidentialism. It might not be too much to suggest that the United States sidestepped the risks of strongman rule in the 1930s only because authoritarianism was so deeply entrenched at the local level and so strongly protected by the Constitution’s structure.

The irony goes deeper still. The resistance those racists mounted to the strong arm of presidentialism in the 1930s ushered in a set of compromises that advanced democracy on other fronts. The new state that took hold in the 1940s not only confirmed the Constitution’s multipart, power-sharing design, it was also more pluralistic in its social reach and inclusive in its operations. It is only now, with the exclusions that supported that settlement uprooted, that presidentialism has been unbridled in the U.S. All this adds up to a distinctly American paradox, one that will likely require a distinctly American response to the puzzle it poses.  America’s democratization abetted the rise of presidentialism, and the rise of presidentialism has exposed American democracy to the risks of backsliding.

Jeremy takes a different tack. He sees my focus on democratization as begging the question. Behind democracy’s advances Jeremy sees the relentless demands of capitalism, in particular, of its demand for free labor.

On this point, I am the one “of two minds.” There is no denying that these successive settlements were serviceable for the advance of capitalism. I think that Jeremy is correct that a good part of the reason American “society” “selected” to supersede prior governing arrangements in the ways that it did is to be found in the demands of an evolving private economy. But I am less convinced that capitalism accounts for the advance of democracy. That seems to me overly deterministic and unduly functionalist. The democratizing impulse is not epiphenomenal. It has been a demonstrably powerful force for change in its own right. In the U.S – where “get-your-knee-off-my neck” is something of a founding precept – it has persistently, and of its own accord, demanded a reordering of the state. Moreover, that impulse has, as often as not, been directed against major corporate interests. It required attention, and it took new settlements hammered out by elites to tame it.

Elite taming figures prominently throughout The Adaptability Paradox, and the book treats it in ways that speak in its own voice to issues raised both by both Jeremy and Rogers. Political economy was, as I present it, the primary preoccupation behind the Constitution’s initial framing. The notables of the eighteenth-century America came together to fashion a government that would be able to address their common concerns with commerce, finance, security, and expansion, all the while tamping down threats to those shared interests. (TAP: 38). The objective, dare I say the Constitution’s aspiration, was to create and sustain a great commercial empire. A republican structure was erected to elicit support for that project by inviting participants to contend over how exactly it should be realized.

Each successive settlement, like the original, managed to keep that overarching ambition at the forefront and to suppress issues and interests that might derail it. Time and again when the shared agenda was threatened, elites were able to turn the national discussion back to issues the Constitution had been designed to deal with: trade, banking, currency, the scope and integration of markets (TAP: 51, 81, 105-6). Empire and corporate power were persistent and controversial agenda items, but they were not deal breakers. Race was the historic deal breaker, and it was persistently suppressed in order to get on with business. Engineering a settlement that would enlist industrial labor in a political economy of “growth” took far longer than earlier challenges, and it entailed a far more comprehensive reorganization, but through the New Deal, an expanding pool of participants found ways to come together behind the development of the commercial republic.

With the rights revolution, however, a different set of issues surged to the forefront. These were the issues of social justice, issues the Constitution had been designed to keep under wraps. They laid bare the polity’s deepest social divisions, and rather than deal with them effectively, the Constitution was left to quake under the pressure of unresolved turmoil. Near the end of his comment, Jeremy points to the new constitutional formalism as another formula “functional enough” to meet the evolving demands of capitalism. I wonder. Can American capitalism work without an equally functional formula for making America’s democracy work?

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Pathways or What is to be done? Rogers Smith and Nikolas Bowie both respond to the problems plaguing constitutional democracy in America today with a call to rethink the possibilities of federalism. Each teases something different out of federalism, but both see in it something more than a way of protecting status hierarchies and filtering out uncomfortable social issues. They treat it rather as a democratic instrument for moving America beyond the current impasse.

Rogers’ federalism is expansive. It looks beyond power relationships structured between the state and national governments of the American constitutional system. Rogers eyes a variety of arenas in which the federalism principle might be applied to break the imperial will to expand  and dominate and to foster instead the self-determination of peoples: greater autonomy for native groups, cooperative partnerships with other nations, a revival of international organizations that foster greater self-sufficiency among the nations of the world. The attractions of Rogers’ expansion of the federalism principle are palpable. But as he acknowledges, an adaptation along these lines is a daunting challenge, both politically and constitutionally. A movement in this direction would require, among other things, a radical rethinking of the sovereignty of nation states, a hitherto unrealized degree of tolerance for difference and diversity, and a cultivation of norms of reciprocity far beyond their current expression. Rogers offers a programmatic guide for further democratization, but the movement needed to advance his program is nowhere in sight.

Nikolas’ federalism is less a programmatic guide for action than an instrument for collective discovery of a program. He urges the use of state-based constitutional conventions as vehicles for mobilizing people around the question of what their government should look like and for rediscovering through institutional deliberation agreeable rules for governing. The states of our federal system would in this way become once again the site of demonstration projects “showing the rest of the country how transformations that might seem radical can be folded within the American tradition.” Nikolas takes today’s progressives to task for their skittishness about constitutional conventions and for placing too much faith in courts for protection. His proposal is refreshingly straightforward both in suggesting a way to overcome our lack of trust in the democratic process and in suggesting a way in which a larger social movement for good government might begin to form. The current distribution of power at both the state and national level also cautions that Nikolas’ proposal is ripe with hazard. The likely result, at least in the short term, is wide variation in the rights available to people in different states. But as he reminds us, democracy is doomed if its advocates are no longer willing to accept the risks that come with it and use the democratic processes at their disposal.

Nikolas’ prescription resonates more broadly with current interest in civic constitutionalism. Elizabeth concludes her comment on just that note. Civic constitutionalism addresses itself directly to the imposing challenges of rebuilding faith in our constitutional democracy. It too turns away from courts and looks to the people themselves to recreate a common sense of constitutional government. The idea is that a shared purpose can be rediscovered through the people’s active engagement with the institutions of democracy.

Count me in on this one. Something along these lines is likely essential if we are to build a strong constitution capable of supporting a fully inclusive polity. A committed Deweyan myself, I see in civic constitutionalism a kindred solution to the problem of the public. But just as civic constitutionalism acknowledges what we have lost, the recovery it promises is a long-term proposition. Examining the unfamiliar ground on which we now tread, I am not sure time is on our side.

Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University. You can reach him by e-mail at stephen.skowronek@yale.edu. 

Eine zähe Reform

Seiner Verkündung im Juni 2006 ging ein zähes Ringen voraus, das der Bundesrepublik sogar ein Vertragsverletzungsverfahren vor dem Europäischen Gerichtshof bescherte, weil man mit der Umsetzung der europäischen Antidiskriminierungsrichtlinien nicht hinterherkam. Nicht minder zäh sollten sich fortan die Bemühungen um eine Weiterentwicklung des Antidiskriminierungsrechts gestalten. Nicht nur der EuGH hatte Reformbedarf angemahnt. Auch die Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes hatte bereits zum 10. Geburtstag des AGG im Jahr 2016 eine umfangreiche Gesetzesevaluation in Auftrag gegeben, die dem deutschen Gesetzgeber dringenden Handlungsbedarf attestierte. Die Ampel-Koalition hatte sich in ihrem Koalitionsvertrag zwar auf eine Modernisierung des AGG verständigt. Das federführende Justizressort unter Marco Buschmann ließ das Gesetz aber schlicht liegen; bis zum (vorzeitigen) Koalitionsende kam nicht einmal ein Referentenentwurf zustande.

Am 14. April hat also nun endlich das Justizministerium zusammen mit dem Bildungs- und Familienministerium einen Referentenentwurf vorgelegt. Dass es sich beim AGG auch nach zwei Jahrzehnten noch um eine hochpolitisierte Materie handelt, wird allerdings auch in dieser Woche wieder deutlich. Das Thema der AGG-Reform brannte nicht zuletzt zahlreichen zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen auf den Nägeln. Gleichwohl ist für die Verbändeanhörung zu dem neuen Referentenentwurf eine Frist von lediglich vier Tagen vorgesehen worden. Das kann man nicht anders deuten, als dass man in den Ministerien lieber nichts hören möchte. In einem Begleitpapier auf der Website des Justizministeriumswird sodann auch offen zugegeben, dass sich die beteiligten Ressorts – hier wird man neben dem BMJV und dem BMBFSFJ insbesondere auf das BMI und das BMWE blicken müssen – in zahlreichen Punkten nicht einig geworden sind.

Eine zögerliche Reform

Das Resultat sind minimalinvasive Änderungen an dem Gesetz, die sich vor allem auf das unionsrechtlich Nötigste beschränken. Angesprochen ist damit etwa die Reform der „Kirchenklausel“ des § 9 Abs. 1 AGG, die nach dem Urteil des EuGH in der Rechtssache Egenberger überhaupt nicht mehr angewendet werden darf. Ein laufendes Vertragsverletzungsverfahren betrifft zudem die Beschränkung des Verbots sexistischer Diskriminierungen auf „Massengeschäfte des täglichen Lebens“ in § 19 Abs. 1 Nr. 1 AGG; auch dieser Umsetzungsfehler wird streng entlang der Richtlinienvorgaben korrigiert (ohne über das geforderte Schutzniveau hinauszureichen).

Entsprechend (un)motiviert ist auch die Ausweitung der Befugnisse der Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes. Sie soll unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen an antidiskriminierungsrechtlichen Gerichtsverfahren teilnehmen dürfen und um eine Schlichtungsstelle erweitert werden. Auch diese Änderungen gehen auf zwingende europäische Vorgaben – nämlich die neuen Equality Bodies-Richtlinien (siehe hier und hier) – zurück. Und auch hier ist die Bundesrepublik eher spät dran. Denn die Umsetzungsfrist läuft bereits im Juni ab. Die Vorgaben dieser neuen Richtlinien dürfte allerdings auch der jetzige Referentenentwurf nicht vollständig abbilden. Denn nicht zuletzt fordern die Equality Bodies-Richtlinien in ihren Art. 8 und 9 robuste Untersuchungs- sowie Stellungnahme- oder Entscheidungsbefugnisse der nationalen Antidiskriminierungsstellen. Dies muss auch die Kompetenz zur Anordnung von Folgemaßnahmen umfassen. Hierzu findet sich im Referentenentwurf indessen nicht viel, wenn es dort lediglich heißt, die Stelle dürfe „Vorschläge zur Abhilfe“ unterbreiten.

Eine zurückhaltende Reform

Nur an wenigen Stellen sucht der Entwurf eine Konsolidierung des deutschen Antidiskriminierungsrechts, die über zwingende europäische Umsetzungsbefehle hinausreicht. Darunter fällt vor allem die Verlängerung der Fristen der §§ 15 Abs. 4 und 21 Abs. 5 AGG. Derzeit muss eine Diskriminierung innerhalb von zwei Monaten förmlich geltend gemacht werden, andernfalls sind die Ansprüche nach dem AGG gesperrt. Diese Fristen sind extrem kurz im Vergleich zu den übrigen Fristen etwa des BGB, wo Ansprüche aufgrund (anderer) Persönlichkeitsrechtsverletzungen regelmäßig erst nach drei Jahren gehemmt sind (vgl. § 195 BGB). Sie hindern effektiven gerichtlichen Rechtsschutz, wo sich die (oftmals rechtsunkundigen) betroffenen Personen erst einmal sortieren und zu einer Geltendmachung von Rechtsansprüchen (immerhin etwa gegen die eigene Arbeitgeberin im laufenden Arbeitsverhältnis) durchringen müssen. Sie versperren aber oftmals auch den Weg zu einer produktiven außergerichtlichen Problembewältigung, weil sie die Betroffenen zu einem rechtlich-konfrontativen Vorgehen drängen. Hier sieht der Entwurf nun eine Verlängerung auf vier Monate vor. Dies ist ein Schritt in die richtige Richtung; der Vergleich mit der Regelverjährungsfrist des BGB, aber auch mit den entsprechenden Fristen im (spärlichen) Landesantidiskriminierungsrecht – etwa ein volles Jahr nach § 8 Abs. 4 LADG Berlin – zeigt indessen, dass auch das reformierte AGG hier restriktiv bliebe.

Eine zahnlose Reform

Der größte Kritikpunkt – gerade aus der Perspektive der Zivilgesellschaft: Der Entwurf verbessert die Mitwirkungsmöglichkeiten der Betroffenenverbände nicht. Gefordert wird hier seit langem eine Prozessstandschaft – also die Möglichkeit, individuelle Ansprüche Betroffener als Verband einklagen zu können – und/oder eine Verbandsklage – mithin die rechtliche Befähigung, bestimmte Diskriminierungslagen auch ohne konkrete Klägerin gerichtlich feststellen zu lassen. Diese Instrumente nehmen Betroffenen ein Stück weit die Last teurer, zeitaufwendiger und oftmals auch psychisch belastender Gerichtsverfahren. Sie können somit den Abstand verringern helfen zwischen dem Recht „in the books“ und dem gelebten, effektiv durchgesetzten Recht „in action“. Beides – Prozessstandschaft und Verbandsklage – bleibt der Referentenentwurf schuldig. Der Entwurf bleibt damit empfindlich hinter anderen Antidiskriminierungsgesetzen zurück. Denn neben dem LADG Berlin kennen insbesondere zahlreiche Gleichstellungsgesetze zugunsten von Menschen mit Behinderung bereits seit längerem Verbandsklagen.

Bilanz

Dabei sollten sowohl die gesammelten Erfahrungen mit diesen Gesetzen, als auch der Rückblick auf 20 Jahre AGG die Debatte versachlichen helfen. Angst vor einer „Klagewelle“ muss man auch unter den Bedingungen einer Verbandsklage nicht haben. Eine Juris-Recherche unter den Stichworten „LADG Berlin“ ergibt eine einstellige Verfahrenszahl unter den relevanten Treffern – und dies vor dem Hintergrund sowohl einer Verbandsklage (§ 9 LADG Berlin) als auch der erheblich längeren Geltendmachungsfrist. Die Gesamtzahl der AGG-Fälle bleibt ebenfalls übersichtlich, wie es auch hier eine Juris-Abfrage nahelegt. Eine einfache Stichwortsuche ergibt hier knapp 2.400 Treffer, also durchschnittlich etwa 120 im Jahr. Darunter sind wohlgemerkt auch Entscheidungen, die lediglich einen einzigen (für die konkrete Entscheidung nicht weiter relevanten) Verweis auf das AGG enthalten; die Zahl der „echten“ AGG-Fälle ist also weitaus geringer. Vollautomatisierte Abschaltvorrichtungen deutscher Dieselfahrzeuge haben somit unsere Justiz in den letzten Jahren um ein Vielfaches mehr „belastet“ als 20 Jahre Antidiskriminierungsrecht.

Ein weiteres unbeantwortetes Problem betrifft das öffentlich-rechtliche Behördenhandeln des Bundes. Hier ist das AGG grundsätzlich nicht anwendbar. Studien zeigen indessen, dass es auch hier immer wieder zu Diskriminierungen kommt. Ein echtes „Allgemeines“ Gleichbehandlungsgesetz müsste zwingend auch auf diesen Bereich erstreckt werden. Das erforderte allerdings einen größeren Wurf als es die Papiere dieser Woche hergeben. Man hätte dem AGG zu seinem runden Geburtstag schon eine etwas größere Torte backen können.

The post Ein Reförmchen zum Geburtstag appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Stephen Skowronek 

            I want to thank Jack Balkin for hosting this symposium on The Adaptability Paradox and to convey my gratitude to the nine scholars who participated. These are all serious and probing commentaries on the book’s themes. No author can ask for more than that.

The commentaries are very different from one another, and they range over a wide field of pertinent concerns. Each deserves a thorough and fully considered response. But even my effort here to touch on a few of the issues that come up recurrently in the commentaries goes on too long. At the risk of trying patience, I will address four.  One has to do with my conception of the relationship between order and change; another, with the book’s disposition toward democracy and democratization; a third, with scope conditions and questions of causation; and a fourth with pathways out of our current predicament.

My responses will appear in two installments. This first post reclaims the ground the book carves out for itself and takes up questions raised about order and change. The next will address the three other areas of interest.

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The Adaptability Paradox asks: “Has American democracy outstripped its constitutional accommodations?” (TAP: vii, ix, 3) It argues that there is reason for concern.  Popular sovereignty is the Constitution’s first and most democratic principle, but for the first 180 years of the Constitution’s development, that principle was sorely compromised by extensive social exclusions. Over the course of our history, democratization repeatedly drove constitutional change.  Institutions were periodically reordered to accommodate a more diverse range of participants and to manage relations among them.  These adaptations entailed an expansion of rights, a relaxation of structural constraints, and the invention of new tools for ameliorating conflict and making a more diverse democracy work. The book interrogates this mode of development for insight into the problems surrounding constitutional democracy in America today.

It lights on a paradox. “We the People” finally became a creditable description of the foundation of American government and politics in the 1970s. But no sooner did the Constitution approach full inclusion than its historic capacity to regenerate firm footings for government and ameliorate conflict began to dissipate. Full inclusion exposed the Constitution’s ambivalence toward democracy. With the nation’s deepest social divisions laid bare, the conflicting purposes harbored by the government’s complex frame were drawn out. Over the past half century of development under conditions of full inclusion, we have not, I contend, seen the various parts of that frame sort themselves out again in an authoritative way, nor have the adjustments made provided a sturdy platform for managing the conflicts now in play.  Instead, we have witnessed a gradually accelerating shakedown of authority, a concomitant erosion of constitutional resilience, and a gathering threat to American democracy itself. Expanding rights and easing constraints facilitated democratization, but that old dynamic has brought us up short. It has left us in a state of high anxiety in which no one can discount the importance of who is next in charge. In that very basic sense, it has confounded the whole idea behind the Constitution’s design.

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Order and Change:  Sandy Levinson casts the problem as one of false expectations: “We as a society envision the Constitution as the foundation not only of unity, but also of stability through time.” I agree with Sandy that this faith in the Constitution’s binding capacity, though deeply ingrained in American political culture, conceals a more troubling reality. The Adaptability Paradox fixes its attention on this cultural conceit. It seeks to set expectations more realistically and to bring our current predicament into sharper relief.

To that end, it reexamines the modicum of unity and stability that was, in fact, repeatedly regenerated through the Constitution over the course of American history. Much of The Adaptability Paradox is devoted to relocating this developmental gyroscope. It breaks its common identification with the Constitution’s formal design and directs attention instead to rearrangements that, from time to time, altered and relaxed it. These contingent settlements were improvised by different sets of participants for their own time-bound purposes. Fashioned around the Constitution, these adaptations changed the way conflicts were ameliorated, the way participant’s interests were protected, and the way instrumental pursuits were supported.

Noah Rosenblum and Elizabeth Beaumont both raise questions about the weight I assign to these “settlements.” As they see it, little about American democracy was ever settled. There was always “pushback” and “backlash. “Dissensus” has been the rule. Contestation has driven political change more or less continuously, each apparent settlement serving as fodder for the next round of conflict and change. I am not unsympathetic to this line of argument. After all, I am documenting the contingency of these constitutional settlements and their rise and fall. Admittedly, “settlement” might be too strong a word for the jury-rigged orderings we periodically constructed to bolster unity and stability and to keep the Constitution working. In fact, I state that case myself: “… amidst all the conflicts these adaptations were designed to manage and the near-constant challenges to those arrangements from those still left out, it is easy to lose sight of the relief they offered. American government has spent far more time in a state of becoming something else than as one thing or another.” (TAP: 34)

But if there are good reasons not to draw sharp distinctions between periods of order and periods of change, there are equally good reasons not to collapse the whole of our constitutional history into a continuous stream of contestation. The remarkable thing is not that conflict has always riddled this polity; it is that elites repeatedly came together to recreate manageable lines of political contestation and trustworthy rules for the government’s operation. These reconstructions were not incidental. Without them and the modicum of consensus they commanded, the Constitution would have shaken itself apart long ago, and now, when the Constitution appears to be shaking itself apart once again, we might want to think more carefully about how in the past it was put back together. As Noah and Elizabeth note, this history is a standing rebuke to formalist fetishisms and constitutional originalism. That old knack for reinvention was our ace in the hole, the key to the Constitution’s unique staying power.

But there is another reason to examine these settlements today. Each significantly altered constitutional relationships and governmental operations going forward. At the end of each round, rights were expanded and constraints were relaxed. That dynamic prompts closer attention to the cumulative effects of reordering, and it raises some timely questions about possible limits to this mode of development.  

Behind the question “has American democracy outstripped its constitutional accommodations?” is the sobering observation that this periodic reordering rested on extensive social exclusion. Developments since the rights revolution and the advent of full inclusion have put the question more starkly: Does successful adaptation of this Constitution require social exclusion? Elizabeth examines my argument closely on this point, and she assures us that it does not. She sees little in full inclusion that changed the game categorically, and, taking a cue from what I myself say about the contingent, always-contested character of earlier settlements, she points to the accommodation of African Americans as an instance of successful constitutional adjustment to the rights revolution. If we are searching for the source of current difficulties, she argues, we should look elsewhere, perhaps to more recent developments like 9/11 or changes in technology.

I remain unconvinced. Yes, the cause of Black civil rights commanded substantial political support. It scored major policy successes and ushered in major changes in government and politics. But my claim is not that the rights coalition failed to advance or expand. It is, in fact, important to my argument that once the civil rights movement broke through the structural barrier of federalism, the expansion of rights accelerated and the incorporation of once excluded groups quickly reached beyond rights for Black Americans. My claim is that the rights revolution expanded its social reach alongside an equally wide-ranging and revolutionary counterinsurgency. (TAP:114) Instead of mutual buy-in to a new arrangement of rights and structure, we got gridlock, confrontation, and polarization. The rights revolution raised a pointed question about the historic relationship between successful adaptation and social exclusion, and as I see it, the response has done little to allay concerns.

Elizabeth tallies up gains for the civil rights coalition and calls it consensus. Previously, however, reordering did more than score policy wins for one side of a sharply contested field. For better or worse, earlier adaptations found ways to placate the most potent political opponents of the transformation under way. New arrangements were crafted in ways that assured both sides of the contest that their vital interests could still be protected. In this regard, the “legacy of losing” [1] for Barry Goldwater in 1964 was significantly different from the legacy of the losing populists of 1896, or the losing South of 1865, or the losing nationalists and nullifiers of 1833, or the losing Anti-Federalists in 1789.  In each of those earlier cases, those whose resistance failed to stop the reconstruction found their interests sufficiently accommodated in the new ordering to buy in to it. Instead of maintaining a hard line against it, they began to participate in its further development. The Goldwater insurgency, in contrast, did not resolve itself in a modus vivendi among the principal combatants. It was only momentarily submerged by the Johnson landslide. It was not extinguished, or bought off, or absorbed. Those insurgents never bought in. Instead, their insurgency metastasized. A tug of war was already apparent in the Nixon administration. With the rise of Ronald Reagan, the government’s rules of operation grew even more unsettled, and the lines of political competition became even less accommodating.

Consider just one example of the constitutional response to this democratic breakthrough: the rise of a “unitary theory” of the executive. The “unitary executive” wraps a constitutional claim of presidential authority in a populist rendering of political legitimacy. It does not anticipate consensus or promote buy-in. It is not a power sharing arrangement. It is a constitutional answer to a political standoff. The theory opens a broad field for unilateral action, allowing presidents to try muscling a set of preferences through in the face of stiff resistance. This theory did not emerge from 9/11, or from later-day globalization, or from an immigration crisis, or from the age of the internet and social media. It was the work of the Reagan administration, part of the broader reaction to changes set in motion by the rights revolution. Recent scholarship has pushed its origins back even farther, to the Nixon and Carter administrations, each vying from opposite sides of the political spectrum to control civil rights policy.[2]  Sandy sums up the point in his commentary: “The present “democratic decline” should be dated from 1970 or so, when, for the first time in our history, one might plausibly describe the United States as a “democracy.” And much of American politics should be understood as the bitter conflict between those who applauded the developments of the 1960s and those determined to resist them, and, if possible, to roll them back.” 

I have taken a lot from Elizabeth’s popular, “bottom up” view of constitutional development, but here I am led to wonder why bottom up gets discounted when the popular energy comes from fierce opponents of democracy’s advance. In building her case that the rights coalition secured a new order before conservatives began pulling it apart, Elizabeth seems more wedded than I am to the old paradigm juxtaposing periods of order to moments of change. My analysis anchors reordering in structural changes in institutions – changes in our political parties, in administrative management, in each of the three branches of government and in relations among them. I catalogue the institutional adjustments engineered by actors on both sides in the political contest over the rights revolution. These changes followed close on the heels of the democratic breakthrough (they all date to 1970s), and collectively, they reconfigured the state in ways that did more to exacerbate political conflict than to ameliorate it, more to magnify stress on the Constitution than to ease it. This evidence seems to me too weighty to shove aside or to pass off to later developments.

Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University. You can reach him by e-mail at stephen.skowronek@yale.edu. 

Background

President Daniel Noboa, who was recently elected in 2025, started a war against the Constitutional Court. It began in August 2025, when the Court declared some laws promoted by the President unconstitutional (see Gutmann). Noboa reacted with a Protest march to the Constitutional Court, accusing the judges of “stealing the peace”. There was even a big banner outside the court, displaying the judges’ pictures and the accusation. This situation set off the United Nations’ alarms. Margaret Satterthwaite, Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers for the United Nations, declared:

“When high-ranking officials label judges as enemies of the people for fulfilling their duties, the independence of the judiciary is jeopardized.”

Now, the second round of intimidation has begun. Last year, the State Comptroller General – in charge of the well management of public resources according to Art. 211 of the Constitution – initiated a thorough audit of the court’s finances and those of the judges. Now, he delivered two reports with evidence of criminal liability against two of the Constitutional Judges. In his sworn financial disclosure statements, he accuses the judges Alí Lozado (former president of the court) and José Luis Terán of alleged inconsistencies. The financial integrity of public officials is of great importance, especially given the level of corruption that has also affected Ecuadorian courts (see Guerrero Salgado). Nevertheless, there is no suspicion of corruption against the Constitutional Court. Therefore, the investigation was identified by many observers, among them the newspaper Expreso (p. 2) (which itself recently faced what were presumably politically motivated investigations), as a continuation of the intimidation against the court; the allegations against Lozado appear to be completely unfounded.

Not the weather for elections

Most likely, the timing and the painstaking nature of the investigations are due to the court having to resolve two cases that are crucial to Noboa’s authoritarian project.

Firstly, the court must decide whether the recent anticipation of the upcoming elections is constitutional. Originally, Ecuadorians were scheduled to vote in local elections (elecciones seccionales) on February 14, 2027. Some days ago, the elections were rescheduled for November 29, 2026 by the electoral authority (Consejo Nacional Electoral, CNE). According to the CNE, this was a technical measure due to meteorological expertise which predicted that the El Niño phenomenon could be particularly severe this coming February. El Niño causes heavy rainfalls, especially in the coastal regions, which might indeed make it difficult to access polling places. Nevertheless, this reason seems to be a pretext. Predictions at such an early stage are still very imprecise. Moreover, this is an unprecedented situation: not even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit Ecuador severely (see Cervantes Valarezo), were elections postponed.

Early elections might favour the ruling party. The elections are probably anticipated to undermine the participation of the only party that can contest against Noboa: Revolución Ciudadana. On 13 March, the Electoral Tribunal accepted the petition of the General Prosecutor to suspend the Revolución Ciudadana party for nine months, the party of the ex-President Rafael Correa. With this suspension, the candidates need to seek affiliation with other parties, which will not be possible within the shortened time span.

It is highly doubtful whether the anticipation of the elections is constitutional, as it will shorten the term of office of the elected representatives. The CNE is also committed to strict neutrality. However, the CNE denied the court’s competence to review the constitutionality of the anticipation. As an act of the “supreme authority” in electoral issues, the rescheduling would not be subject to constitutional review. In fact, the CNE plays an important role in the institutional setting established by the Ecuadorian constitution (CRE). The electoral function (función electoral), headed by the CNE is declared one of the five powers (Art. 217 CRE). But this position in no way implies that the CNE is not subject to constitutional control. In a constitutional state, all state powers are bound to the Constitution. It would be absurd to assume that the executive branch, as one of the five branches of government under the CRE, is exempt from constitutional review. On the contrary, the CRE subjects all state powers to constitutional review by the Constitutional Court; no exception is stipulated for the CNE.

Appointment of the General Prosecutor

On the other hand, the Constitutional Court must analyse the constitutionality of the appointment of the current General Prosecutor, Leonardo Alarcón. This is a faculty owned by the “Consejo de Participación Ciudadana”, but after the resignation of the last Prosecutor and the Attorney General’s interpretation, the Judiciary Council appointed by itself a lawyer friendly to the government. Now, the same Leonardo Alarcón has begun a criminal investigation against the constitutional judges.

Broader context

This is nothing new in Ecuador’s history. Back in 1946, a similar situation occurred. Ecuador’s 1945 Constitution established for the first time a Constitutional Tribunal with the power of judicial review (p. 57). When then-President Velasco Ibarra felt the pressure from the Constitutional Tribunal’s restrictions, he decided to change the Constitution and to remove the Constitutional Tribunal. As Agustín Grijalva says:

“Velasco viewed the Court, as he publicly stated, as a superpower that subjugated the Executive branch. This is a common complaint among those who seek to concentrate power when faced with the limits of constitutional control.”

Eighty years have passed by since then, and the battle remains the same. Even President Noboa intended to change the 2008 Constitution with the November 2025 referendum. Luckily, people did not accept the proposal. 61.80 % of the population voted against Noboa’s referendum. Yet the Constitutional Court continues to be a thorn in President Noboa’s side. He tries to align the Constitutional Court, while he already controls the Electoral Council, the Electoral Court, the Prosecutor General, the Comptroller General, the Judiciary Council, and the Civic Participation Council. Of course, this inconvenience only means that the Constitutional Court is doing a good, independent job.

Constitutionalism is the limit of democracies based on reason (Elster and Slagstad, p. 34). And the purpose is simple; there must be fixed rules in a government so that when the majority in parliament, or the executive, does not change the basic rules of the government. In other words, Constitutions limit authoritarianism when a ruler tries to go beyond their rules. Therefore, the Constitution is the covenant in which the main rules and rights of a society are written, and the Constitutional Court is its guardian (see Vinx).

What’s next?

Democracies die slowly. In Ecuador, its struggle for survival has reached a tipping point. As shown, most state authorities are already aligned with the president, making it easy to pressure the constitutional court. The court seems to be the last man standing who can safeguard the rule of law. In a public statement, it expressed its concerns about the intimidation and reaffirmed that “its judges will continue to perform their duties in accordance with the Constitution and the law, provided that the necessary safeguards for the independent and secure performance of their duties are maintained”.

To maintain this position, however, the Constitutional Court would need the freedom to make bold decisions, and the government would need to accept this. Whether the conditions for this still exist is currently unclear. It is deeply concerning that judge Raúl Llasag, who is regarded as progressive, recently resigned, presumably due to mounting pressure.

What is left for the Ecuadorians? The 2008 Constitution holds a key. Art. 98 establishes the right to resist against actions of the public power that harm constitutional rights. In this case, the des-institutionalization only weakens Ecuadorian democracy. President Noboa is interfering in the checks and balances of the government. This kind of interference has led to the resignation of presidents like Richard Nixon in 1974. This precedent is a landmark where “no person, not even the President of the United States, is completely above the law “(Jianzhou, p. 7). In Ecuador, this question seems to be open. The international community should closely monitor this situation.

The post Last Court Standing appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

India experienced a very similar crisis back in 2018. But at the Indian Supreme Court, justices publicly defended institutional integrity: The scene was extraordinary: constitutional court justices going public to warn of internal institutional risks. Their justification was equally extraordinary: “democracy is at risk” if institutions cease to function according to transparent and collegial rules. The Indian episode offers a comparative mirror of remarkable clarity for understanding what is now unfolding at Brazil’s STF.

Collegiality, individual power, and the risk of personalized Courts

In recent years, Brazilian scholarship has identified a widely recognized phenomenon at the STF: the so-called “ministrocracia”, a term used to describe a court in which individual decisions by its justices dominate the decision-making process, often displacing collegial deliberation (see the analysis by Diego Werneck Arguelhes and Leandro Molhano Ribeiro). This decision-making practice functions without the institutional checks that collective accountability is designed to provide. Justices control agendas, grant injunctions of enormous institutional impact, and often determine the direction of constitutional controversies without full deliberation. The result is a Court in which institutional authority fragments into individual powers.

This phenomenon produces an institutional paradox. On the one hand, the STF has never been so powerful. On the other hand, its authority as a collegial tribunal is weakened. This erodes the idea that its decision is, first and foremost, a collectively constructed opinion of the Court. When collegiality weakens, the tribunal ceases to be perceived as an institution and comes to be seen as the sum of its members’ individual preferences.

The Indian judicial governance crisis

It was precisely this kind of structural vulnerability that triggered an institutional crisis in India in January 2018. In both cases, the crisis is primarily about the internal governance of the court itself. In India, as will be shown, concerns focused on the opaque allocation of cases, while in Brazil, they revolve around the concentration of procedural and investigative powers in individual justices.

In an unprecedented move for the Indian judiciary, four of the Supreme Court’s most senior justices – Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur, and Kurian Joseph – held a historic press conference to publicly warn of internal institutional risks and defend the Court’s integrity. During the event, they disseminated an open letter to Chief Justice Dipak Misra. The document denounced grave institutional practices, including the strategic assignment of cases and the composition of judicial panels in ways that could potentially influence the outcome of sensitive decisions (see the analyses by Richard Albert and Adeel Hussain). The episode was not merely a personal conflict. It revealed a deeper crisis of judicial governance, centered on the Court’s internal decision-making structures.

The Chief Justice has the prerogative to assign cases to panels, a power traditionally exercised on administrative and institutional grounds. According to the four dissenting justices, however, that power was being exercised in an opaque and potentially strategic manner, with politically sensitive cases directed to panels considered favorable to certain positions. The complaint did not target the merits of the decisions; rather, it addressed the Court’s operational structure and the specific conduct of its Chief Justice.  It was institutional in essence: when case allocation ceases to be transparent and predictable, the risk of decisional manipulation increases. The Indian justices’ reaction was radical. By making the letter public, they broke a tradition of institutional discretion.

But they justified the measure as an attempt to protect the Court itself, to preserve its institutional integrity.

The Brazilian Banco Master scandal

In Brazil, the Banco Master scandal has produced a crisis that is similar in structure but far more severe in its consequences. In November 2025, Brazil’s Central Bank ordered the liquidation of Banco Master following a series of suspected financial irregularities, including the issuance of high-yield instruments backed by illiquid or fraudulent assets (see Folha de S. Paulo and The Economist). As reported by CNN Brasil, the case soon expanded into a complex, multi-institutional investigation involving financial actors, public authorities, and regulatory bodies, eventually reaching the Supreme Federal Court. But the true constitutional significance of the crisis lies not in the magnitude of the financial fraud, but in the contamination of the STF itself through conflicts of interest that reach the heart of judicial governance.

Justice Dias Toffoli, rapporteur of the Master inquiry, ordered seized evidence to be stored at the STF’s own premises rather than with the Federal Police, selected the experts responsible for analysis, and travelled to the Copa Libertadores final aboard the same private aircraft as one of the defense lawyers. Meanwhile, his family’s stake in the Resort Tayayá, in Paraná State, had been sold to a fund linked to the brother-in-law of Daniel Vorcaro, the very target of the investigation he was conducting. On 12 February 2026, after a 200-page Federal Police report detailed these connections, a three-hour meeting of the ten justices culminated in Toffoli’s departure from the case, as reported by Tiago Angelo and Giullia Colombo.

The parallels with the Indian episode are striking. In India, the crisis centered on the opaque exercise of the Chief Justice’s case-allocation prerogative. In Brazil, it centered on the rapporteur’s power to direct an investigation in which he was, in effect, implicated (see Ricardo Brito). In both cases, what was at stake was the structural integrity of governance mechanisms that are supposed to be transparent, impersonal, and institutionally accountable.

Power concentrated in one Justice

If Toffoli’s case is a testament to the problem of conflicts of interest in case management, the involvement of Justice Alexandre de Moraes reveals a distinct but equally corrosive pathology: the concentration of investigative, adjudicatory, and retaliatory powers in the hands of a single justice.

Moraes’s connection to the Master scandal is mediated through his wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes, whose law firm signed a contract worth R$ 129 million (roughly U$ 25 million) to represent Banco Master -a contract in which payments of R$ 3.6 million per month were treated as an absolute priority by the bank’s founder, as reported by Joan Royo Gual in El País. The most recent revelations, however, go much further. Messages recovered from Vorcaro’s seized phone show that the banker maintained an intense exchange with Moraes on the very day of his arrest, 17 November 2025, asking, at one point, whether the justice had managed to “block” something. The use of self-destructing messages and the exchange of screenshots containing typed notes indicate a pattern suggesting an effort to avoid scrutiny, reflecting a high degree of awareness regarding the highly problematic nature of the contact. Separate messages reveal that Vorcaro visited Moraes’s home and that Moraes visited Vorcaro’s residence in Brasília, where the justice was reportedly introduced to the then-president of the BRB, the state bank whose purchase of Master was subsequently blocked by the Central Bank.

Rather than recuse himself, Moraes initiated an ex officio inquiry to investigate the purported leakage of financial data from both the Council for Financial Activities Control (COAF) and the Federal Revenue Service (Receita Federal), using his authority as rapporteur of the Fake News Inquiry to order ankle bracelets, passport revocations, and bans from Receita Federal premises against suspected public officials (see CNN Brasil).

This is the ministrocracia taken to its most extreme expression. When a single justice controls the most consequential investigative instrument available to the Court, and deploys it not only against threats to democracy but against those who expose the justices’ own conduct, the boundary between institutional protection and individual self-preservation collapses.

The Ethics Code impasse and the silence of the Brazilian Supreme Court

One further dimension of the crisis is quite fascinating in a comparative perspective. In early March 2026, STF Chief Justice Edson Fachin signaled the need for a formal Code of Ethics, designating Justice Cármen Lúcia to lead discussions (see the report by Sarah Teófilo, Mariana Muniz, and Ivan Martínez-Vargas in O Globo). Toffoli and Moraes immediately opposed the proposal in plenary session, arguing that the existing regulation was sufficient, as reported by Isadora Rupp. Toffoli went further, defending judges’ right to maintain business interests and to receive dividends from family enterprises.

The contrast with the Indian case is instructive. In India, the crisis was triggered by justices who challenged the Chief Justice in the name of institutional integrity. In Brazil, the two justices most directly implicated have not only refused accountability but also have actively resisted any institutional reform that might constrain them. Where the Indian dissenters broke with tradition to defend the institution against its own leadership, Toffoli and Moraes have broken with some of their colleagues to defend themselves against the institution. The subsequent cancellation of the institutional lunch that Fachin had scheduled to discuss the code, and the reported silence of the other justices, speaks to the depth of the internal crisis in the Court (see Mariana Muniz and Sarah Teófilo).

Democratic erosion in an election year in Brazil

The timing of this crisis could hardly be worse. Brazil enters the 2026 electoral cycle – with general elections held on 4 October – as its highest judicial institution is engulfed in a scandal that, though not directly implicating President Lula, profoundly damages the institutional environment on which democratic governance depends. The Banco Master scandal exemplifies how a loss of judicial legitimacy, particularly during high-stakes periods like election years, creates a power vacuum that authoritarian populists readily exploit to deconstruct constitutional safeguards. The STF’s legitimacy was a decisive bulwark during the Bolsonaro years, particularly against the invasion of the Three Powers, against attempts to subvert electoral results, and against the coordinated assault on democratic norms. That bulwark now stands compromised not by external attack but by internal corrosion.

The political risks are concrete and serious. The far right, whose project of institutional capture was challenged and defeated, in the end, by the STF’s own action, now finds in the Banco Master scandal the most potent ammunition for its narrative of judicial illegitimacy. The moral authority of those judicial acts is retroactively called into question, not necessarily in law, but in public opinion, which is where elections are decided. Investigative reporting has already demonstrated the extensive connections between the Master group and figures of the right-wing coalition (see Murillo Camarotto et al.). The scandal is not ideologically one-sided. But the political exploitation of the STF’s discredit is profoundly asymmetric: it serves above all those who wish to dismantle or subordinate the Court.

A weakened STF in an election year is an invitation to democratic regression. The scenario in which public trust in the Court collapses, exactly when the Court may be called upon to decide on contested electoral outcomes, legislative overreach, or executive abuse, is the scenario most favorable to authoritarian populism. This is quite shocking, but the lesson of comparative constitutional experience is unambiguous: courts that lose their moral authority in the eyes of the public become unable to perform the counter-majoritarian function upon which constitutional democracy depends. When a court’s legitimacy is exhausted, its rulings lose their character as authoritative mandates and are instead relegated to the realm of political bargaining. Brazil is currently teetering on this very precipice in 2026.

The Court and its Justices

Supreme courts are frequently analysed by their decisions. But their institutional legitimacy depends on something deeper: their internal practices. How are cases distributed? How are conflicts of interest managed? How do justices respond to their own crises? These questions are as important as the content of decisions.

The Indian episode demonstrated that institutional integrity may demand institutional courage, even from the justices themselves. The Banco Master scandal has forced into public view the governance structures that ordinarily operate behind the constitutional text. Yet while in India the alarm was raised by justices acting in defence of the institution, in Brazil it has been raised by investigative journalism, the Federal Police, and a reluctant political system, while the justices most directly implicated have responded with denial, retaliation, and resistance to any reform.

This different response reveals that what Brazilian scholarship has termed “ministrocracia” has reached a stage at which the Court’s internal corrective mechanisms are themselves compromised. If the greatest lesson of the Indian case was that a strong Supreme Court is one in which the institution is greater than its justices, the Brazilian crisis of 2025–2026 offers its dark corollary: when individual justices grow more powerful than the institution, the institution loses its capacity for self-correction, and, most seriously, its claim to democratic legitimacy. And that is a lesson no democracy can afford to ignore.

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Die möglichen Folgen dieser Einstufung wiegen schwer. Sollte das Straßenfest tatsächlich nicht den privilegierten Versammlungsstatus genießen, so wäre die Nutzung des Altmarkts eine gemäß § 18 SächsStrG genehmigungsbedürftige Sondernutzung, für die nach § 21 SächsStrG zudem eine Gebühr zu zahlen wäre. Außerdem müssten die Veranstalter:innen – ebenfalls anders als bisher – für die Kosten der Sicherung der Veranstaltung und die Reinigung des Platzes aufkommen. Angesichts dieser drohenden Kosten ist fraglich, ob das Straßenfest wie bisher stattfinden kann. Entsprechend laut fiel der Protest gegen die Weisung in den vergangenen Wochen aus. Der Dresdner Oberbürgermeister sprach von der Schaffung eines „Bürokratiemonsters“, während die Queer-Beauftragte der Bundesregierung den Fall für „mehr als problematisch“ hielt. Eine Dresdner Stadträtin warf der LDS zuletzt sogar einen „politisch motivierten Angriff auf die Versammlungsfreiheit“ vor. Der sächsische Innenminister stellte sich dagegen hinter seine Behörde.

Zwei Erkenntnisse kann man aus dem Vorgang in Dresden gewinnen: Erstens ist der rechtliche Standpunkt der LDS deutlich unsicherer, als sie ihn darstellt. Zweitens – und dies wiegt angesichts der ersten Erkenntnis umso schwerer – sendet die LDS, sekundiert vom sächsischen Innenminister, politisch ein fatales Signal: Anstatt der queeren Community in angespannten Zeiten den Rücken zu stärken, macht sie es der Zivilgesellschaft schwerer, für Sichtbarkeit, Vielfalt und Toleranz einzutreten.

 Versammlung oder Volksfest?

Im Vordergrund steht die Frage, ob die Einschätzung der LDS, das Straßenfest stelle in seiner Gesamtheit keine Versammlung dar, rechtlich tragfähig ist. Da das Fest auf dem Altmarkt und der Umzug, die gemeinsam als „CSD Dresden“ firmieren, organisatorisch und inhaltlich eng miteinander verbunden sind, lässt sich diese Frage in zwei Schritten beantworten: Das Fest ist dann eine Versammlung, wenn erstens der CSD-Umzug Versammlungscharakter aufweist und zweitens die Stände des Straßenfests an diesem Status teilhaben.

Ob der CSD-Umzug eine Versammlung ist, ergibt sich in Sachsen aus § 2 Abs. 1 S. 1 SächsVersG. Demnach ist eine Versammlung jede örtliche Zusammenkunft von mindestens zwei Personen zur gemeinschaftlichen, überwiegend auf die Teilhabe an der öffentlichen Meinungsbildung gerichteten Erörterung oder Kundgebung. Dies entspricht dem engen Versammlungsbegriff, den das BVerfG seiner Auslegung von Art. 8 GG zugrunde legt (BVerfGE 104, 92, Rn. 39). Greift man dementsprechend für die Auslegung des SächsVersG auf die Rechtsprechung des BVerfG und BVerwG zurück, ergibt sich für Veranstaltungen, bei denen die Meinungskundgabe mit Aspekten moderner Eventkultur (Musik, Tanz etc.) zusammentrifft (sog. gemischte Veranstaltungen), Folgendes: Nicht jede Musik- und Tanzveranstaltung wird allein dadurch zu einer Versammlung, dass es anlässlich des Partygeschehens auch Meinungskundgaben gibt (BVerfG, 12.07.2001 – 1 BvQ 28/01, 1 BvQ 30/01, Rn. 22). Die Meinungskundgabe muss vielmehr in der Gesamtschau aller Umstände die Veranstaltung bestimmend prägen (BVerwGE 129, 42, Rn. 17). Auf dem CSD-Umzug dienen die Musik- und Tanzelemente dem übergeordneten Zweck, ein Zeichen für die Gleichberechtigung queerer Menschen zu setzen und die Sichtbarkeit dieser Menschen sowie ihrer Lebensweise im öffentlichen Raum zu steigern. Bei dem CSD-Umzug handelt es sich also um eine Versammlung i.S.d. § 2 Abs. 1 S. 1 SächsVersG. Davon geht auch die LDS aus.

Mehr als nur Beiwerk

So weit, so einfach. Die zweite Frage, ob das CSD-Straßenfest die Versammlungseigenschaft des Umzugs teilt, ist dagegen komplexer. Das liegt daran, dass das BVerfG bislang noch keine abschließende Entscheidung darüber getroffen hat, ob sog. infrastrukturelle Einrichtungen (Informations- und Imbissstände, Küchen- und Toilettenwagen etc.) in den Schutzbereich der Versammlungsfreiheit fallen. Es gibt zwar mehrere Kammerentscheidungen zu dieser Frage (hier, hier und hier), jedoch haben diese bisher noch keinen einheitlichen Maßstab aufgestellt.

Das BVerwG hat dagegen in seinem Klimacamp-Urteil von 2022 (BVerwGE 175, 346) zwei alternative Kriterien aufgestellt, wann die Versammlungsfreiheit infrastrukturelle Einrichtungen schützt. Diese Kriterien kann man auch für den vorliegenden Fall nutzen: Der Schutzbereich ist entweder eröffnet, wenn derartige Einrichtungen einen inhaltlichen Bezug zur Meinungskundgabe haben, die die Versammlung bezweckt, oder aber, wenn sie für die konkrete Versammlung logistisch erforderlich und ihr zudem räumlich zuzurechnen sind (BVerwGE 175, 346, Rn. 27). Für das Straßenfest muss man also zwischen Einrichtungen, die inhaltlich die Belange des CSD fördern, und sonstigen Einrichtungen unterscheiden, die thematisch nicht spezifisch dem CSD zuzuordnen sind und daher auch auf einer Veranstaltung mit einer vollkommen unpolitischen Ausrichtung (Volksfest, Nachbarschaftsfest, Street-Food-Festival) vorzufinden wären.

Zur ersten Gruppe gehören neben Rednerbühnen und Informationsständen auch Musikanlagen und sonstige Einrichtungen, mit denen die Veranstalter:innen und Teilnehmenden des CSD ihre Anliegen ausdrücken. All diese Einrichtungen haben einen Bezug zur Meinungskundgabe und sind folglich Teil der Versammlung. Verfehlt wäre es in diesem Kontext insbesondere, zwischen dem „politischen Umzug“ und dem „kulturellen Straßenfest“ zu unterscheiden. Genau das macht die LDS aber scheinbar. Wenn es gerade der Zweck des CSD ist, für die Gleichberechtigung queerer Menschen einzutreten und die öffentliche Sichtbarkeit der LSBTIQ*-Kultur zu erhöhen, so verkennt die LDS diesen Zweck, wenn sie den kulturellen Aspekt des CSD als unpolitisch abtut. Dass ein Bekenntnis zur LSBTIQ*-Kultur allemal und genuin politisch ist, zeigt allein schon die Debatte über das Hissen der Pride Flag über dem Reichstagsgebäude aus dem vergangenen Jahr.

Für die zweite Gruppe von Einrichtungen (insbesondere Gastronomie, Verkaufsstände und Toilettenwagen), gilt dagegen, dass sie – den räumlichen Bezug unterstellt – für die Versammlung logistisch erforderlich sein müssen. Das setzt voraus, dass die Versammlung ohne diese Einrichtungen nicht ablaufen könnte (BVerwGE 175, 346, Rn. 29). Hier legen die Verwaltungsgerichte einen strengen Maßstab zugrunde. So entschied etwa das VG Berlin für den Berliner CSD 2016, dass gastronomische Stände für die Durchführung der Versammlung nicht notwendig seien, da es den Teilnehmenden insoweit freistehe, sich selbst Verpflegung mitzubringen oder aber auf das gastronomische Angebot in der Nähe des Versammlungsortes zurückzugreifen (VG Berlin, 24.11.2016 – 1 K 115/14). Diese Argumentation lässt sich unschwer auf das in der Dresdner Innenstadt angesiedelte Straßenfest übertragen. Wenn es den sonstigen Verkaufsständen an der logistischen Erforderlichkeit mangelt, läge der Schutz des Versammlungsrechts nur dann vor, wenn diese einen inhaltlichen Bezug zur Meinungskundgabe hätten. Dieser ließe sich möglicherweise durch die äußere Gestaltung der Stände oder die Aufmachung der angebotenen Waren herstellen. Anderenfalls fielen die Stände jedoch nicht unter das Versammlungsrecht und wären damit genehmigungspflichtige Sondernutzungen. Dies müsste man jedoch von Stand zu Stand feststellen. Die logistische Erforderlichkeit von Toilettenwagen für das Straßenfest kann man aber durchaus annehmen. Bei einer Teilnehmerzahl von mehreren tausend Personen könnten die sanitären Kapazitäten des räumlichen Umfelds des Altmarkts schnell an ihre Grenzen geraten.

Es ist also eine Frage des Einzelfalls, ob die Versammlungsfreiheit die Einrichtungen auf dem Straßenfest schützt oder nicht. Bei einer Vielzahl von inhaltlich ausgerichteten Ständen wäre dies wohl ebenso der Fall wie bei Einrichtungen, die für die Durchführung der Versammlung logistisch notwendig sind. Diese erforderliche Differenzierung lässt die LDS jedoch vermissen und widerspricht damit den vom BVerfG und BVerwG entwickelten Maßstäben. Besonders irritiert dabei, dass die LDS ihre Entscheidung damit rechtfertigt, rechtlich dazu verpflichtet zu sein. Es entspräche jedoch vielmehr der Pflicht der Verwaltung zum gesetzmäßigen Handeln, die Umstände des jeweiligen Einzelfalls konkret zu prüfen. Dafür wäre der Natur der Sache nach die Stadt Dresden als örtlich zuständige untere Behörde prädestiniert. Über deren Entscheidung setzt sich die LDS mit ihrer Weisung jedoch bewusst hinweg. Die Weisung der LDS steht in ihrer Pauschalität damit auf tönernen rechtlichen Füßen.

Gegenmobilisierung trifft Verunsicherung

Noch problematischer erscheint das Vorgehen der LDS jedoch, wenn man es in einen breiteren queerpolitischen Kontext einordnet. Schon seit Jahren nimmt in ganz Deutschland die Queerfeindlichkeit zu (Mokros und Zick, S. 165). Sowohl bei der Queerfeindlichkeit allgemein als auch bei der Gegenmobilisierung gegen CSD-Events ist Sachsen ein Brennpunkt (Arant et al., S. 36; Düker et al., S. 2). Dieser Trend hat sich in den letzten Jahren noch einmal verstärkt: So gab es 2025 gegen mindestens elf der 17 CSDs im Freistaat Protestkundgebungen, womit Sachsen bundesweit die Spitzenposition einnahm (Düker et al., S. 2). Laut Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) stammten die Teilnehmenden an diesen Kundgebungen überwiegend aus dem gewaltorientierten rechtsextremistischen Spektrum. Insgesamt hat der Kriminalpolizeiliche Meldedienst in Sachsen für das Jahr 2025 163 Fälle von Hasskriminalität aufgrund der sexuellen Orientierung erfasst, viele davon im Umfeld der CSD-Paraden. Die tatsächliche Fallzahl dürfte noch deutlich höher liegen (Bellmann und Stock, S. 10).

Diese Gegenmobilisierung führt bei den Teilnehmenden an den sächsischen CSDs zu einer gesteigerten empfundenen Unsicherheit. In einer aktuellen Studie gab mehr als ein Drittel der Befragten an, Personen zu kennen, die aus Angst vor Anfeindungen nicht an den Umzügen teilnähmen (Bellmann und Stock, S. 33). Somit scheint die rechtsextreme Agitation ihrem Ziel, queere Menschen zu verunsichern und ihre Lebensweise aus der Öffentlichkeit zu verdrängen, jedenfalls teilweise näherzukommen.

Dieser zunehmenden rechtsextremen Gegenmobilisierung steht eine sächsische Staatsregierung gegenüber, deren Queerpolitik viele in der Vergangenheit wiederholt als unzureichend bemängelt haben. Zuletzt kritisierten Verbände etwa die Streichung der Fördermittel für die spezialisierte Beratung für queere Geflüchtete. Ferner hat die LAG Queeres Sachsen den „Landesaktionsplan zur Akzeptanz der Vielfalt von Lebensentwürfen“ als unzureichend kritisiert. Bei der Sicherung der CSDs gibt es zudem Vorwürfe, das Land würde zu wenig für den Schutz der Teilnehmenden bei der An- und Abreise tun. Dieser Befund spiegelt sich darin wider, dass lediglich die Hälfte der 2025 befragten CSD-Teilnehmenden angab, auf den Schutz durch die Polizei zu vertrauen (Bellmann und Stock, S. 46).

Das falsche Zeichen zur falschen Zeit

Vor diesem Hintergrund hat die Weisung der LDS eine fatale Signalwirkung. Die Behörde spricht einem wichtigen Teil des Dresdner CSD auf eine pauschale Art und Weise seinen politischen Charakter ab. Sie suggeriert damit, dass es sich beim CSD anstelle eines schutzwürdigen und für die Teilnehmenden durchaus mit einem gewissen Risiko verbundenen Eintretens für eine offene Gesellschaft vielmehr um eine reine Spaßveranstaltung handle. Unter den gegebenen Umständen muss dies zumindest aufseiten der Betroffenen den Eindruck erwecken, die Verwaltung suche mehr nach Gründen, den CSD einzuschränken, als dass sie an seinem Schutz interessiert sei. Dass die LDS anscheinend bereits seit Längerem darauf hinarbeitete, dem Straßenfest den Versammlungscharakter abzusprechen, verstärkt diesen Eindruck noch. Der LDS ist daher zu raten, ihre Weisung zurückzunehmen, sollte ihr daran gelegen sein, derartige Zweifel an ihrer Unvoreingenommenheit zu zerstreuen. Stattdessen sollte sie das Engagement derjenigen anerkennen, die sich auch unter zunehmendem Druck von rechts weiterhin für ein offenes und vielfältiges Sachsen einsetzen. Die Zivilgesellschaft hingegen sollte sich trotz des stärker werdenden Gegenwinds und dieser widrigen Bedingungen nicht einschüchtern lassen, so schwer dies unter den gegenwärtigen Umständen erscheinen mag.

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An ambivalent decision at a critical juncture

The decision comes at a sensitive moment for the right to strike in Italy, Europe, and beyond. Long considered to be in crisis, this right has been increasingly constrained by legislation, judicial interpretation, and transnational economic governance (see, e.g., Ewing in here and Correa de la Hoz here). In recent years, however, it has re-emerged as a key instrument of collective participation, both economic and political – dimensions that are difficult to separate anyways. From climate strikes to transnational labour mobilisations (see, e.g., here), strikes now function not only as tools of industrial conflict but also as vehicles of contestation and potential constitutionalisation “from below”. This renewed role is particularly significant in a context where traditional institutions of representative democracy appear less and less capable of translating democratic demands and social justice goals into concrete policies. Against this backdrop, some scholars have begun advocating for the constitutionalisation of a right to political strike in EU law. Recent mass general strikes in Italy and elsewhere illustrate this development: they have mobilised diverse movements around the contestation of economic policies, including military spending and regressive taxation, the articulation of social justice claims – especially concerning gender, territorial, and migrant inequality – and the attempted enforcement of Italy’s international obligations, notably in relation to arm deliveries in the context of international crimes committed in Gaza by the Israeli forces.

Taken together with these developments, the ECSR’s decision is both timely and ambivalent. It (re)affirms the systemic importance of the right to strike and condemns excessive restrictions and the expansive notion of “essential services”. However, it overlooks key problematic aspects of the current Italian framework. This blogpost therefore critically engages with its reasoning, particularly the assumption that judicial review is effectively available. In reality, not only the formal legal framework but also the concrete functioning of the administrative and judicial infrastructure surrounding the right to strike shapes its effectiveness, often limiting its broader constitutional and transformative potential in subtle ways. In this sense, analysing the Italian case provides an example useful to other contexts and systems, as it illustrates how procedural, micro-level practices may effectively de-activate strong constitutional entitlements.

The right to strike in Italian constitutional development

In Italian constitutional history, few rights have been as central as the right to strike enshrined in Article 40 of the 1948 Constitution (“the right to strike shall be exercised in compliance with the law”). While politically contested from many points of view, two core elements were widely shared amongst constituent forces. First, there was a clear break with the model based on repressive – criminal and administrative – measures that, in different forms and degrees, had characterised both the liberal (1861-1922) and Fascist (1922-1943) periods. The essential aspects of the right – holders, legitimate aims, limits, etc. – were to be governed by parliamentary legislation. This “reservation to legislation” was intended not only to ensure legal certainty (for example, when strikes affect other fundamental fights) and democratic oversight, but also to enable constitutional review. Second, the constitutional right to strike – that is, the constitutional protection of the strategic withdrawal of expected labour – was conceived not merely as a socio-economic entitlement but as a cornerstone of democratic participation and a tool for rebalancing power in the workplace and society at large.

However, after the Constitution entered into force, no statutory legislation regulating the right to strike and balancing it with other constitutional rights was enacted for over forty years. The only applicable rules remained the anti-strike provisions inherited from the Fascist-corporatist regime, which postwar governments did not repeal. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the new Republic experienced widespread repression of workers’ movements (see, e.g., here) and delays in securing judicial independence. The Constitutional Court became operational only in 1956, while the Supreme Judicial Council – the body ensuring judicial independence – was established in 1958.

Only the interventions of the Constitutional Court rendered this framework compatible with the 1948 Constitution. Faced with prolonged legislative inertia, the Court, from the early 1960s, effectively reshaped Fascist-era legislation through selective declarations of unconstitutionality and evolutive interpretations, progressively expanding both the legal notion and constitutional protection of the strike. This process culminated in 1974, when a landmark judgment recognised “pure” political strikes as protected under Article 40, in parallel with widespread mobilisation by established trade unions as well as student, feminist, workerist and other grassroots movements. In a country still marked by deep social, economic, and territorial inequalities, this dynamic proved crucial for implementing the Constitution’s most progressive provisions, including workers’ rights, social security, education, and healthcare. The open-textured nature of Article 40 enabled a transformative interaction between collective action, judicial development, and legislative reform, fostering a form of constitutionalisation “from below”. This process relied on a judge-made law guided by the Constitutional Court in dialogue with ordinary judges, particularly younger ones influenced by critical legal scholarship advocating an “alternative use of the law”. In adjudicating strike-related disputes, the Court aimed not only to resolve individual cases but to orient strike practices in line with the broader constitutional framework.

The political-economic shifts since the 1980s are well known: fragmentation of labour movements due to diversification, tertiarisation, and globalisation; the crisis of trade unions’ stabilising role in neo-corporatist settings; and a turn towards “regulatory” models of political and economic governance. More generally, (neo)liberal governance has triggered and/or reinforced those trends, promoting the competitive alignment of fiscal, welfare, and labour systems, weakening workers’ solidarity at both national and transnational levels and reducing unions’ bargaining power (for examples drawn from European monetary policies, see here and here). While by no means not unique to Italy, these developments interact with its still-strong constitutional protection of the right to strike. Over time, however, this protection has been significantly neutralised, especially in EPS, where strikes remain relatively effective but are increasingly constrained.

Neutralising the right to strike

The neutralisation of an otherwise strongly protected constitutional right has occurred through the “administrativisation” of the regulatory framework concerning the strike in EPS. Faced with the weakening of the 1970s neo-corporatist compromise and the explosion of micro-conflicts (especially in public services), Law no. 146/1990 originally aimed to promote the (self-)regulation of strikes through collective agreements between workers and employers, with the Commission acting as an expert body tasked with evaluation and follow-up sanctions, subject to review by ordinary courts. The Commission was not intended to exercise general regulatory powers. Its independence from the executive was to be ensured by its composition: members appointed jointly by the Speakers of Parliament from among experts in constitutional law, labour law, and industrial relations, and barred from holding political or representative roles. At the time, parliamentary practice still reflected a more pluralist system, including the convention that one Speaker came from the opposition.

Today, however, this context has changed. Both Speakers are expressions of the governing majority, and the Commission is widely perceived as politically aligned, increasingly exercising its mandate not to balance the right to strike with competing rights, but to minimise its exercise. Subsequent legislative developments (especially Law no. 83/2000) and administrative practice have progressively reinforced the Commission’s role.

First, it has made extensive use of anticipatory “moral suasion” in conciliation and cooling-off procedures. In specific disputes, the Commission issues advance “invitations” or “guidance,” effectively pre-assessing the parties’ conduct and signalling the consequences of non-compliance. Although formally non-binding and not directly challengeable in court, these acts function in practice as the parameters for subsequent sanctions, shaping behaviour ex ante. Second, the Commission may adopt “provisional regulations” replacing collective agreements deemed “unsuitable” to guarantee EPS. These “provisional” regulations, subject to review by administrative courts, have been particularly influential in key sectors such as local public transport, where in some instances they have remained in force for over fifteen years. Third, recent years have seen a resurgence of executive return-to-work injunctions, exposing workers to potential criminal liability. Typically issued by the Minister of Internal Affairs shortly before a scheduled strike, these measures can be challenged only before administrative courts under extremely tight deadlines, restrictive standing requirements, and deferential standards of review. The requirement of a “concrete and actual” interest often leads to inadmissibility, as disputes may become moot once collective agreements are renewed or the injunction’s effects expire. Preventive interests – such as avoiding future violations – are not recognised as sufficient.

As a result, judicial remedies are effectively limited to urgent proceedings, with all their constraints. Even when courts reach the merits, in assessing the conduct of striking workers they tend to defer to the Commission’s prior “invitations” and “guidance”, emphasising its independence and expertise, and to apply stricter scrutiny only where the executive acts without such indications. This logic not only weakens effective protection of the right to strike but also prevents courts from engaging with the broader social role of trade unions and collective action.

To sum up, the current framework of strikes in EPS is centred on anticipatory measures. At the macro level, these include assessments of the (in)suitability of collective agreements and the adoption of “provisional regulations”. At the micro level, they include “invitations,” “guidelines,” and “proposals,” as well as the procedural interaction between the Commission and executive authorities. Sanctions and injunctions still matter, but they operate as “silent guests,” shaping conduct before any action occurs. As a result, collective conflict is managed through administrative tools that keep it below the threshold of social visibility, within a context marked by growing inequalities and unrest. Unsurprisingly, while the overall number of strikes has declined, there has been an increase in general and “spontaneous” strikes – forms that more easily bypass administrative constraints but also have a greater impact on conflicting rights.

Rights without remedies: the missing link between protection and judicial infrastructure

In its decision, the ECSR rightly found that the lack of clear statutory standards defining “public services” violates Article 6§4 ESC, as it allows administrative bodies to expand the notion of “essential services” excessively. However, in the light of the framework described above, equally or more problematic are issues concerning effective judicial protection. The relocation of disputes over the Commission’s acts to administrative courts – combined with restrictive standing rules and deferential standards of review – has significantly weakened such protection. On this point, the ECSR’s reasoning is unconvincing, as pointed out by Salcedo Beltrán in her separate dissenting opinion, joined by Olivier De Schutter. The decision merely noted that Commission decisions can be challenged in court and cited a 2023 Council of State judgment annulling a ruling on strike distancing in the transport sector in a ‘provisional regulation.’ From this single example, it drew general conclusions about the availability of effective remedies, without distinguishing between different measures – such as return-to-work injunctions – or examining how proceedings function in practice. Moreover, in that cited case, the isolated annulment was not based on excessive restriction of the right to strike, but on deficiencies in the preliminary investigation, which undermined the proportionality of the measure.

The problem of the overly broad definition of “essential services” identified by the ECSR cannot be separated from that of effective judicial protection. In fact, the Commission’s expansive interpretation is largely a product of weak judicial oversight, which has enabled administrative discretion to grow unchecked, beyond the reach of constitutional and ordinary courts. Judicial review of decisions by “independent” expert bodies is effective only where clear legal standards exist and procedural rules allow meaningful challenges. In Italy, the prominence of administrative courts – combined with limited jurisdiction of ordinary courts and the Constitutional Court – has marginalised constitutional review. These courts are excluded from assessing many of the administrative and regulatory acts that shape the right to strike. Even when prompted, administrative courts do not raise questions of constitutionality concerning key provisions of Law no. 146/1990 conferring broad discretionary powers. This is particularly problematic in a system lacking direct individual access to the Constitutional Court, which cannot review administrative acts. Overall, the current framework is ill-suited to capture the broader social and political role of workers movements and collective conflict and facilitates executive-oriented discretion.

This is not to say that the ECSR decision is meaningless. The decisions of this expert body, while not formally binding per se, are recognised as “authoritative” in interpreting binding ESC provisions and might finally push Italian (administrative) courts to raise questions of constitutionality. However, despite its important findings, which might influence domestic developments, the decision misses the deeper link between rights protection and the institutional infrastructure sustaining it. This is even more important as European political skies become increasingly gloomier, and Italy, where the adoption of repressive “law & order”, anti-protest legislation has increased, has been recently found to be among the “dismantlers” of the rule of law.

I thank Julia Emtseva and the editors of Verfassungsblog for their comments and feedback.

The post Neutralised (Right to) Strike appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

The case raises a broader constitutional question: does the expansive logic of EU primacy extend equally in criminal law? Or do the EU Treaties themselves set structural limits in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ)?

We argue that the latter is the case. In criminal law, primacy does not operate in the same way as in the internal market. Article 67(1) TFEU requires respect for national legal systems and traditions. This matters, and it shapes the limits of EPPO jurisdiction.

The current debate – from Article 16 to Article 86

The current debate builds directly on the Council of State’s recent decision on Article 16. For decades, Article 16 had been understood to prohibit the establishment of private universities in Greece. In that ruling, however, the court read the provision in light of EU law and upheld legislation allowing private institutions.

That move now shapes the current debate. The argument is straightforward: if Article 16 can be “adapted” through EU law, why should the same not apply to Article 86? Or, put differently, if EU law can reshape the constitutional meaning of one provision, can it also allow the EPPO to move past the rule that only Parliament may initiate proceedings against ministers?

At first sight, this analogy has some appeal. It promises a coherent and integration-friendly solution. On closer inspection, however, it proves misleading.

Primacy – but of what?

The starting point is familiar. Since Costa v ENEL (Case 6/64), the Court of Justice has insisted that EU law cannot be overridden by domestic legal provisions. In Simmenthal (Case 106/77), it drew the practical consequence: that national courts must immediately disapply conflicting national law, without waiting for its prior repeal. Primacy is thus not just a formal principle, but a rule of procedural application wherever a genuine normative conflict arises.

At the same time, the Court’s later case law shows that primacy operates within a structured constitutional framework. In Melloni (C-399/11), the Court held that where EU law has fully harmonised a field (in that case, the European Arrest Warrant), national constitutional standards cannot be invoked to undermine its primacy, unity and effectiveness. In criminal law, however, the Court has taken a more nuanced approach. In M.A.S. and M.B. (Taricco II, C-42/17), it accepted that national courts are not required to disapply domestic rules where doing so would violate fundamental principles of criminal legality that form part of constitutional identity.

That difference is telling. Primacy in criminal law does not simply mirror its operation in the internal market. Constitutional constraints matter – and they shape how far primacy reaches.

The question, then, is not whether primacy exists, but how it plays out across different integration fields.

No clear rule, no automatic primacy

The Greek case shows what this means in practice. Before asking whether Article 86 must give way, a more fundamental question arises: does EU law actually give the EPPO jurisdiction over ministers in this situation?

In its decision of 16 June 2025, the EPPO’s Permanent Chamber answered: no. It referred proceedings against two former ministers to the Greek authorities and declared itself not to be competent.

Crucially, the EPPO Regulation contains no rule that directly addresses this scenario. The Chamber therefore relied on an analogy to Article 34(1) of Regulation 2017/1939: where an investigation reveals that the facts fall outside the EPPO’s competence under Articles 22 and 23, the case must be referred to national authorities. Faced with a gap concerning constitutionally entrenched ministerial jurisdiction, the Chamber referred the case to the Greek Parliament – the constitutionally competent body.

The use of analogy is revealing, as it confirms that the Regulation does not lay down a clear and unequivocal rule displacing national constitutional jurisdiction in such circumstances. Where Union law itself leaves a regulatory gap, primacy has nothing to attach to.

This is more than a technical procedural detail. It marks an institutional boundary: the EPPO itself stopped where national constitutional jurisdiction began.

A similar pattern appears in Croatia. In the Beroš case, a conflict of competence arose between the EPPO and national prosecutorial authorities. Under Article 25(6) of Regulation 2017/1939, the Croatian Prosecutor General decided that the case should remain at the national level. Although the EPPO formally disagreed, it ultimately transferred the case, because EU law itself gives the final word to the national authority. Once again, the EPPO did not override national jurisdiction. It stepped back when national competence was asserted.

As long as Union law does not displace the national allocation of competences, there is no conflict that would automatically trigger primacy.

Criminal prosecution is not the internal market

But the comparison with the Article 16 case is flawed for a deeper reason. That decision arose in the context of the internal market and the fundamental freedoms. It was about the expansion of economic freedom. Notably, the Council of State interpreted EU law on its own, without referring the question to the Court of Justice.

The EPPO constellation is fundamentally different. This is not about expanding freedom, but about exercising criminal prosecution – about state coercion. This distinction is significant for the EU’s model of integration: the internal market expands freedom. Criminal prosecution restricts it. Criminal procedural law is not only a matter of competence, but also of fundamental rights protection. It sets the conditions under which the state may use coercive power and thereby directly engages fundamental rights.

This difference is not only functional but also enshrined in primary law.

The Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice begins with Article 67(1) TFEU, which expressly obliges the Union to respect “the different legal systems and traditions of the Member States.” Article 86 TFEU, the legal basis of the EPPO, is located in the same title. This means that the EPPO’s powers are systematically subject to an explicit obligation to respect national legal systems and their traditions. There is no comparable clause in internal market law.

This points to a different logic of integration in the AFSJ. It shows that the AFSJ does not follow the same integration logic as the internal market. In criminal law, the Union has opted for a cooperative model that accommodates national traditions.

Special jurisdictions as a legal tradition

Article 86 of the Greek Constitution is part of a long-standing constitutional tradition. Rules on ministerial responsibility already existed in the revolutionary constitutions of 1822, 1823 and 1827 – even before the modern Greek state was formally established. The current system builds on that history.

Today, Article 86 establishes a specific procedural regime: 1) Parliament decides whether to initiate proceedings, 2) a special parliamentary committee conducts the preliminary investigation, and 3) if Parliament decides to prosecute, a Special Court composed of senior judges tries the case.

This is not merely a political arrangement. It is a fully fledged system of criminal procedure. The constitutional revision of 2019 reaffirmed this model, even after the EPPO Regulation had entered into force. Greece thus deliberately chose to maintain it.

Whether or not this system is normatively desirable is a different question. What matters here is that it is deeply embedded. If Article 67(1) TFEU requires respect for national traditions, then this is precisely the kind of arrangement it has in view.

Not only a Greek matter

This is not uniquely Greek. In Germany, criminal law is also constitutionally sensitive. In its Lisbon judgment, the Federal Constitutional Court described it as part of the core of state sovereignty. The Basic Law contains comparable structural rules. For example, Article 46 GG requires parliamentary consent before criminal proceedings may be brought against members of Parliament. Beyond such specific rules, the organisation of prosecution itself reflects constitutional choices – including the balance between executive control and prosecutorial independence. The point is not that these systems conflict with EU law. The point is that they are constitutionally embedded. When EU criminal prosecution powers intersect with such structures, the issue is not technical. It concerns the constitutional design of criminal justice.

This becomes particularly clear where jurisdiction shifts back to national authorities under Article 25(6) of the EPPO Regulation, as in the Croatian case. In such situations, national rules on prosecutorial organisation, including ministerial instructions in Germany, come back into play.

In other words, the organisation of criminal prosecution reflects historically grown and constitutionally entrenched choices about how democratic control over penal power is exercised. When Union competences intersect with these arrangements, the issue goes to the heart of the relationship between Union authority and national constitutional structures.

Conclusion

The Greek debate is not an outlier. It brings into view a broader structural question – one that also affects Germany and the functioning of the EPPO framework more generally.

Article 67(1) TFEU points in a clear direction: the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice does not follow the same logic as the internal market. In this field, the Union must respect the legal systems and traditions of the Member States. Special national competences in criminal law are therefore not political relics. They reflect constitutional choices about how states organise and control penal power.

The EPPO is not the internal market. This is where the argument turns. If we take the Treaties seriously, we cannot simply carry over the logic of primacy developed for the internal market without adjustment. In criminal law, primacy operates within a framework that recognises national constitutional structures. It is here that the limits of an overly expansive understanding of primacy come into view.

The post Why Primacy Operates Differently in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Inzwischen hat Merz die Aussage zwar relativiert. Doch die Frage bleibt: Welche Aufenthaltsmöglichkeiten gibt es für Schutzsuchende mit humanitärem Aufenthaltstitel, wenn der Grund für den humanitären Schutz entfällt? Es spricht nach wie vor viel dagegen, dass der Grund entfällt und ein pauschaler Widerruf überhaupt möglich ist. Für einen großen Anteil der Betroffenen gibt es allerdings bereits eine Alternative zum Asylrecht: Die Beantragung jedes beliebigen anderen Aufenthaltstitels schützt rechtssicher vor einem eventuellen Widerruf syrischer Anerkennungen.

(Noch) keine Einschränkungen bei der Wahl des Aufenthaltsrechts

Rechtlich ist es so einfach wie noch nie, während eines humanitären Aufenthalts aus dem Inland weitere Aufenthaltstitel zu beantragen. Typische Hindernisse bei inländischen Aufenthaltserteilungen sind regelmäßig das fehlende Visum gemäß § 5 Abs. 2 AufenthG sowie die Titelerteilungssperre wegen eines abgelehnten Asylantrags gemäß § 10 Abs. 3 AufenthG. Doch beide Hindernisse greifen bei SyrerInnen mit humanitärem Aufenthaltstitel nicht. Der Asylantrag wurde gerade nicht abgelehnt und solange die Person eine Aufenthaltserlaubnis besitzt, wird bei der Erteilung eines Aufenthaltstitels gemäß § 39 S. 1 AufenthV kein Visum benötigt (vgl. auch BR-Drs. 731/04, 185). Damit ist die Erteilung fast aller Aufenthaltstitel aus dem Inland heraus möglich.

Allerdings nur zeitlich begrenzt: Die Visumsbefreiung besteht nämlich nur so lange, wie auch ein Aufenthaltstitel noch besteht. Sollte also kurzfristig der Schutzstatus und im Folgenden der humanitäre Aufenthaltstitel widerrufen werden oder auslaufen, ist ein Visumsverfahren wieder erforderlich. Weil die deutsche Botschaft in Damaskus gerade erst wieder eröffnet wurde, liegt darin ein besonderes Hindernis. Aktuell ist die Botschaft in Beirut noch für die meisten Verfahren zuständig. Sie weist darauf hin, dass mit mehrmonatigen Terminwartezeiten in allen Antragskategorien zu rechnen ist. Betroffene sollten also schon jetzt mögliche Aufenthaltstitel beantragen. Dies liegt nicht nur im Interesse der Betreffenden selbst, sondern auch im Interesse der Arbeitgeber, die auf ihre syrischen Arbeitskräfte angewiesen sind. Ansonsten drohen ein potenzieller Arbeitsausfall oder Haftungsrisiko wegen illegaler Beschäftigung gemäß § 404 SGB III.

Die Beantragung eines weiteren Aufenthaltstitels führt auch nicht zum Erlöschen des bestehenden Aufenthaltstitels. Es ist ein weit verbreiteter Mythos, dass ein Aufenthaltstitel nur gewechselt werden könne. Dafür findet sich allerdings keinerlei Anhaltspunkt im AufenthG. Mehrere Aufenthaltstitel können sehr wohl nebeneinander erteilt werden, solange die erforderlichen Erteilungsvoraussetzungen vorliegen (vgl. BVerwG, Urteil vom 19. März 2013 – 1 C 12.12, Rn. 17 ff.). Gerade SyrerInnen müssen also nicht frühzeitig ihren humanitären Aufenthaltstitel aufgeben. Eine Ausnahme besteht nur bei den – bei SyrerInnen eher seltenen – Aufenthaltserlaubnissen gem. § 25 Abs. 5 AufenthG, die bei Ausreisehindernissen erteilt werden. Denn § 25 Abs. 5 AufenthG knüpft im Tatbestand an eine vollziehbare Ausreisepflicht des Ausländers an und ist damit gegenüber anderen Aufenthaltstiteln subsidiär (BVerwG. Beschluss vom 1. April 2014 – 1 B 1.14, Rn. 5).

Das ungelöste Problem der Niederlassungserlaubnis

Problematisch ist, dass gemäß § 52 Abs. 1 Nr. 4, 5 AufenthG auch eine Niederlassungserlaubnis widerrufen werden kann (siehe bereits hier). Eine tatbestandliche Ausnahme für Personen mit humanitärem Schutzstatus, wie sie andere Aufenthaltstitel kennen, gibt es hier gerade nicht (vgl. BVerwG, Urteil vom 13. 4. 2010 – 1 C 10.09, Rn. 18). Ob ein Widerruf hier ermessensfehlerfrei begründet werden könnte, ist allerdings zweifelhaft, weil diese Personen regelmäßig schon besonders integriert sind. Die überwiegende Lebensunterhaltssicherung und hinreichenden Sprachkenntnisse, die mindestens für Niederlassungserlaubnisse erforderlich sind, sprechen eher dagegen. Doch allein die Möglichkeit des Widerrufs stellt für InhaberInnen bereits ein erhebliches Risiko dar, gerade weil behördliches Ermessen nur bedingt gerichtlich überprüfbar ist – und wenn die von Merz nun vorgeschlagene Soll-Zahl auch aufenthaltsrechtlich durchgesetzt werden soll.

Auch bei einer Niederlassungserlaubnis ist es grundsätzlich denkbar, andere Aufenthaltstitel sicherheitshalber parallel zu beantragen. Allerdings wird dies dadurch erschwert, dass für eine Niederlassungserlaubnis keine pauschale Visumsbefreiung gem. § 39 S. 1 AufenthV besteht. Sollten die humanitären Niederlassungserlaubnisse widerrufen werden, wären die InhaberInnen tatsächlich schlechter gestellt als InhaberInnen einer Aufenthaltserlaubnis.

Was die Fachkräftemigration abdecken kann

Im Zentrum medialer Berichterstattung stehen häufig syrische Fachkräfte. Allerdings ist der Aufenthalt für Fachkräfte (§§ 18a, 18b AufenthG) nur für einen Bruchteil der rund eine Million Syrerinnen und Syrer bzw. der ca. 700.000 Schutzsuchenden eine realistische Option. Laut der Bundesagentur für Arbeit gab es im September 2024 ca. 287.000 syrische Beschäftigte, davon 236.000 bzw. 82 Prozent in sozialversicherungspflichtigen Beschäftigungen (hier, S. 5). Im Mai 2024 arbeiteten etwa 59 Prozent dieser sozialversicherungspflichtigen Beschäftigten mit syrischer Staatsangehörigkeit in einer qualifizierten Beschäftigung als Fachkraft (hier, S. 7). Für die Fachkräftemigration kommen ausgehend von diesen Zahlen also nur ca. 14 Prozent der syrischen Staatsbürger in Deutschland in Betracht. Der Anteil der Antragsberechtigten unter jenen, die aktuell eine humanitäre Aufenthaltserlaubnis besitzen, dürfte derzeit noch niedriger sein, weil unter syrischen Staatsangehörigen mit kürzerer Aufenthaltsdauer der Anteil an Erwerbstätigen mit qualifizierter Beschäftigung geringer ist (hier, S. 7, 10). Außerdem besteht ab einem Alter von 45 Jahren das höchste im Aufenthaltsrecht allgemein festgelegte Mindestgehaltserfordernis von 55 Prozent der Beitragsbemessungsgrenze (55.770 Euro Bruttojahresgehalt). Dieses verwehrt gerade älteren Geflüchteten, die neu im deutschen Arbeitsmarkt einsteigen, eine Aufenthaltserlaubnis für Fachkräfte.

Der Anteil Antragsberechtigter wäre vermutlich deutlich höher, wenn der deutsche Arbeitsmarkt nicht so stark auf den Abschluss fokussiert und das diesbezügliche Anerkennungssystem nicht derart überkomplex wäre. Vor der Flucht übten ca. 91 Prozent der Syrerinnen und Syrer nach dem Verständnis des Instituts für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) eine Fachkräftetätigkeit oder eine Tätigkeit auf noch höherem Niveau aus (hier, S. 10). Nach der „SoKo“-Erhebung des BAMFS aus 2023 hatten dagegen jedoch nur 16,6 Prozent der syrischen Asylerstantragstellenden einen formellen Berufsausbildungs- oder Hochschulabschluss (hier, S. 15). Eine solche Diskrepanz lässt sich nicht allein dadurch erklären, dass das IAB die Fachkräftetätigkeit zu weit auslegt. Hinzu kommt, dass die Beschäftigungsquote bei kürzeren Aufenthaltszeiten auch deshalb so niedrig ist, weil sich viele Personen noch in langwierigen Qualifizierungs- und Anerkennungsverfahren befinden. Gerade bei humanitärer Migration wird dieses Defizit der deutschen Arbeitsmarktintegration besonders deutlich, weil – anders als bei der klassischen Arbeitsmigration – diese Personen bereits eingereist sind, bevor geklärt ist, ob ihre Ausbildung, ihr Studium oder ihre beruflichen Qualifikationen in Deutschland anerkannt werden. Ähnliche Formen beruflichen Abstiegs lassen sich zurzeit auch bei UkrainerInnen beobachten (hier).

Andere Aufenthaltserlaubnisse

Neben der Fachkräftemigration existieren weitere auf Erwerbstätigkeit bezogene Aufenthaltstitel. Für diese Formen der Arbeitsmigration gibt es jedoch keine pauschale Aufenthaltserlaubnis bei Erwerbstätigkeit, sondern eine Vielzahl relativ kleinteiliger Regelungen (insbesondere § 19c Abs. 1 AufenthG i.V.m. den Bestimmungen der BeschV). Auf den ersten Blick scheint der Aufenthaltstitel zur Beschäftigung bei ausgeprägter berufspraktischer Erfahrung (§ 19c Abs. 2 AufenthG i.V.m. § 6 BeschV) für SyrerInnen in Betracht zu kommen. Doch praktisch werden die Voraussetzungen kaum erfüllt sein. Denn der Titel setzt einen Berufs- oder Hochschulabschluss sowie ein Mindestgehalt von 45 Prozent der Beitragsbemessungsgrenze (45.630 Euro Bruttojahresgehalt) voraus. Einfacher zu beantragen ist dagegen die Aufenthaltserlaubnis für eine selbstständige Tätigkeit (§ 21 AufenthG), die für etwa 20.000 SyrerInnen in Frage kommt.

Besteht an der Beschäftigung ein öffentliches Interesse, kann die Behörde nach § 19c Abs. 3 AufenthG im Einzelfall eine Aufenthaltserlaubnis erteilen. Die Vorschrift eröffnet also einen gewissen Spielraum, um erwerbstätigen SyrerInnen den Aufenthalt über das Arbeitsmigrationsrecht zu sichern. Als praktisch handhabbare Lösung hat die Verwaltung wohl erwogen, an bestehende Erwerbstätigkeit oder einen längeren Voraufenthalt (§ 19c Abs. 1 i.V.m. § 9 BeschV) anzuknüpfen. Danach könnten SyrerInnen, die zwei Jahre eine versicherungspflichtige Beschäftigung ausgeübt haben oder sich seit drei Jahren erlaubt in Deutschland aufhalten, ohne großen Prüfungsaufwand eine Aufenthaltserlaubnis zur Ausübung einer Erwerbstätigkeit erhalten. Dies erscheint grundsätzlich als nachvollziehbare Kompromisslösung, würde jedoch gegen die aktuelle Rechtsprechung des Bundesverwaltungsgerichts verstoßen. Denn das Gericht schließt die Anwendung der Regelung bei allen humanitären Aufenthaltstiteln aus (vgl. BVerwG, Urt. v. 21.8.2018 – 1 C 22.17, Rn. 19 ff.; aktueller OVG Niedersachsen, Beschl. v. 18.04.2024 – 13 ME 31/24). Rechtssicher wäre dieser Weg nur, wenn die Beschäftigungsverordnung entsprechend klargestellt oder geändert würde.

Berufsausbildung

Für SyrerInnen, die kurzfristig keinen anderen Aufenthaltstitel erhalten können, wäre die Aufnahme einer Berufsausbildung eine Möglichkeit (dann § 16a AufenthG). Nach erfolgreichem Abschluss lässt sich ein Fachkräfteaufenthalt an die Berufsausbildung anschließen. Dies setzt rechtlich zunächst voraus, dass monatlich mehr Mittel als beim BAföG-Höchstsatz zur Verfügung stehen (im Regelfall 959 €). Gerade bei geringer Ausbildungsvergütung kann das ein erhebliches Hindernis sein. Für unterstützende ArbeitgeberInnen wird hingegen eine Rolle spielen, ob das regelmäßig erhöhte Gehalt nach Abschluss der Ausbildung tragbar ist. Aus diesem Grund wird dies häufig nur in Branchen in Betracht kommen, die zwingend auf Personal angewiesen sind. Gerade im medizinischen Bereich sollte man sich jedoch vom Gedanken verabschieden, Teile des syrischen Personals als qualifizierte, aber billige Hilfskräfte einzusetzen.

Abseits der Erwerbstätigkeit werden viele Aufenthaltsmöglichkeiten nur beschränkt erreichbar sein. Ein Aufenthalt aus familiären Gründen kommt für jene in Betracht, deren Ehegatten, Eltern oder minderjährige Kinder im Besitz eines alternativen Aufenthaltsrechts (§§ 29 ff. AufenthG), deutsche Staatsbürger (§ 28 AufenthG) oder Unionsbürger (u.a. § 2 FreizügG/EU) sind. Möglich ist außerdem eine Aufenthaltserlaubnis zum Studium (§ 16b AufenthG). Dabei ist allerdings zu beachten, dass eine parallele Erwerbstätigkeit nur eingeschränkt zulässig ist.

Was die Verwaltung verschläft

Die Ausländerbehörden sollten die Zahlen der potenziellen Antragsteller nicht unterschätzen. Bisher wurden offenbar noch relativ wenige alternative Aufenthaltstitel beantragt. Je näher ein möglicher Widerruf rückt, desto eher ist mit einem schlagartigen Anstieg der Antragszahlen zu rechnen. Gerade deshalb braucht es eine Migrationsverwaltung, die sich als effektiver Dienstleister versteht und schon jetzt in offensichtlich unproblematischen Fällen über die mögliche Erteilung eines Aufenthaltstitels als Fachkraft informiert. So lassen sich die zu erwartenden Anträge zeitlich besser verteilen und zugleich Unsicherheiten bei den Betroffenen abbauen. Angesichts der häufig ohnehin überlasteten Ausländerbehörden liegt die Verantwortung dafür gerade auch bei den übergeordneten Landesbehörden und der Bundesagentur für Arbeit, die über wesentliche persönliche Daten verfügt und solche Informationskampagnen ermöglichen könnte.

Wer aktuell ausgeschlossen wird

Ein wesentliches Hindernis, vor allem beim Aufenthalt zum Studium und beim Familiennachzug, ist das Erfordernis der Lebensunterhaltssicherung: Die AntragstellerInnen müssen den notwendigen Lebensunterhalt grundsätzlich selbst decken können. In der Praxis orientiert sich dieses Minimum an den Regelsätzen der einschlägigen Grundsicherung (Bürgergeld oder Sozialhilfe, beim Studium BaföG). Für Familien mit mehreren Kindern kann dieses Erfordernis eine unüberwindbare Hürde darstellen, weil bei einer Bedarfsgemeinschaft nicht auf die Lebensunterhaltssicherung der Einzelperson, sondern auf die aller Mitglieder abgestellt wird. Besonders betroffen sind Alleinerziehende, die häufig sowieso nur eingeschränkt erwerbstätig sein können, weil Kinderbetreuungsplätze in Deutschland vielerorts weiterhin kaum zugänglich sind. Dies zeigt sich aktuell auch bei den vielen alleinerziehenden Ukrainerinnen.

Im Ergebnis werden damit wohl vor allem vulnerable Personen von alternativen Aufenthaltstiteln ausgeschlossen, die auf dem Arbeitsmarkt ohnehin schlechtere Chancen haben: Frauen mit Betreuungsverantwortung, Personen mit mehreren unterhaltsberechtigten Kindern und Menschen, die wegen einer Behinderung nur eingeschränkt erwerbsfähig sind. Für sie ist der Wechsel in einen auf Erwerbstätigkeit gestützten Aufenthaltstitel sowohl rechtlich als auch tatsächlich versperrt (hier, S. 9), und andere Optionen scheitern an der Lebensunterhaltssicherung.

Welche Aufenthaltstitel den in Deutschland lebenden SyrerInnen offenstehen, hängt letztlich davon ab, wie die tatsächliche Widerrufs- und Rückführungspraxis auf Dauer aussehen wird. Will die Bundesregierung auch nur ansatzweise an der von Merz angekündigten Zielgröße festhalten, wird die Verwaltung diese besonders vulnerablen Gruppen von Anfang an in den Fokus nehmen müssen. Ein flächendeckender Widerruf wäre für alle Beteiligten – Syrerinnen und Syrer, aber auch Arbeitgeber und sowieso schon überlastete Ausländerbehörden – eine enorme Herausforderung.

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This raises a pressing question: Is it justified to disobey the constitution in order to rebuild democracy and the rule of law? I argue that constitutional disobedience may not only be justified, but is legally required under certain conditions. In fact, both genuine fidelity to substantive constitutional values and Hungary’s membership in the EU support a legal duty to disobey the constitution in favour of democratic rebuilding.

The paradox of an anti-constitutionalist constitution

Hungary’s current constitutional situation exhibits a problematic constitutional paradox: the constitution, which aims to establish and uphold values like democracy and the rule of law, is abused to undermine precisely those values. The current Hungarian constitution, for example, restricts minority rights, erodes the separation of powers, and entrenches the power of the ruling party. The constitution served as a basis for a vast number of legal reforms, which ultimately resulted in a legal system in which democratic erosion was masked by formal legality. Requirements for legislative supermajorities, changes in appointment terms for public officials, as well as the capture of courts jointly ensured that even an electoral defeat does not necessarily lead to a change of governing power.

In such a context, strict obedience of the constitution does not preserve democracy – instead, it perpetuates democratic erosion. The Hungarian constitutional dilemma is therefore characterised by colliding legal duties: the duty of formal fidelity to the constitution clashes with the duty to re-establish and uphold constitutional values, particularly democracy and the rule of law. This raises the question whether the duty of strict constitutional obedience can be replaced with a duty of constitutional disobedience if it favours substantive constitutional values. Initially, a duty to disobey can be construed from multiple points of departure. In the following, I investigate a political and a legal justification for constitutional disobedience.

The political case for constitutional disobedience

The political case for constitutional disobedience rests on the premise that the constitution is an expression of the will of the people. Thus understood, constitutions are not self-justifying instruments but are instead instruments of democratic self-government. However, when a constitution erodes its own democratic foundation, the duty to obey it is weakened.

Democracy essentially expresses the idea of a people’s self-government. The current Hungarian constitution clashes with this idea in two senses: first, the constitution was essentially enacted by Fidesz without the participation of opposition parties. This raised substantiated doubts about the constitution’s democratic credentials. For a constitution created without regard for the plurality of existing societal values can hardly be said to reflect the will of the people as a whole. Second, the constitution notably undermines democratic values by entrenching government power and considerably weakening the separation of powers, which enabled the government to rule essentially unrestrained. Moreover, the constitution restricts fundamental rights. Hence, the constitutional text itself, which already rests on a shaky democratic basis, further facilitates the erosion of the democratic infrastructure and democratic values. When the constitution actively undermines its own aims, disobedience is politically justified.

Another political argument for constitutional disobedience can be construed from the electoral results. The act of voting is not just the exercise of a political right, but an act that carries normative weight. The overwhelming electoral victory of the Tisza party, which promised constitutional change, can be interpreted as a clear democratic mandate which relies on a renewed expression of the people’s will. When the existing constitutional framework prevents the realisation of the expressed will of the people, disobeying that framework is politically justified. This does not mean that politics precede the law in general. However, in exceptional cases, it means that the democratically expressed will of the people can override a constitution with weak democratic credentials.

The legal case for constitutional disobedience

While a political case for constitutional disobedience can be made, this approach is subject to limitations. It is difficult to frame such a political duty in legal terms. Appeals to the will of the people do not contain concrete standards according to which law-applying institutions can make decisions. Hence, the political justification, while compelling, cannot carry the sole argumentative burden for constitutional disobedience. Instead, the case for constitutional disobedience must be grounded in the law itself. In fact, it is possible to construe, based on the current Hungarian legal system, a legal duty to disobey the constitution in order to rebuild democracy. This duty relies, on the one hand, on Hungarian constitutional law and, on the other hand, on Hungary’s membership in the EU.

Regarding the first legal pathway, Hungary’s current constitution – although enacted as an instrument to mask authoritarian efforts as constitutional endeavours – contains express commitments to the values of democracy and the rule of law. These values need not be hollow phrases devoid of actual meaning. When they are taken seriously, substantive fidelity to the constitution requires that constitutional provisions undermining these values must be actively disobeyed. When constitutional rules undermine the separation of powers, prevent democratically legitimate governance, and restrict fundamental rights, which are closely linked to a substantive understanding of democracy, a strict interpretation of the constitution would paradoxically undermine the commitment to democracy and the rule of law. Hence, constitutional disobedience is not only justified, but constitutionally necessary to enforce substantive constitutional values.

The second legal pathway to constitutional disobedience relies on Hungary’s membership in the EU. The new government will not exist in a legal vacuum. Rather, it will operate within the framework of EU law. Within this framework exists a duty to interpret national legal provisions, including those of constitutional law, consistently with EU law. When this is not possible, national law must be disapplied. This obligation is especially relevant in light of Article 2 TEU, which enshrines democracy and the rule of law as fundamental EU values. The recent decision in European Commission v Poland (C-448/23) illustrates especially well that Article 2 TEU does not just contain political commitments, but legally enforceable values that create tangible legal obligations for EU Member States. Hence, a national constitution which actively erodes democracy and the rule of law directly clashes with obligations under EU law. Consequently, the duty of EU-consistent interpretation requires that constitutional rules which obstruct the values of Article 2 TEU be set aside.

The foregoing shows that Hungarian constitutional law and EU law mutually reinforce each other in creating a legal duty to disobey constitutional provisions which undermine democracy and the rule of law. In this case, constitutional disobedience is only formally against the law. On the substantive level, constitutional disobedience expresses fidelity to a legal commitment that is both grounded in the national constitution and EU law. This argument notably points toward a preference for substantive constitutional governance over strict, value-neutral adherence to the constitutional text.

Conclusion: law, not politics

Hungary’s constitutional moment forces us to address uncomfortable questions about the limits of constitutional obedience. When constitutional infrastructure is eroded and constitutional values are undermined, constitutional disobedience constitutes a powerful counter-instrument. Case in point, in the process of rebuilding Hungarian democracy, Tisza can disobey constitutional provisions which go against express constitutional values. This is not just a political possibility, but a legal necessity grounded in the constitution itself and EU law. This dual legal basis not only normatively strengthens the duty but simultaneously offers a safeguard against the potential problem of selective compliance: of course, if constitutional disobedience can be legally justified, the question arises what prevents selective disobedience for self-serving motives. The answer lies in the external constraint of EU law: disobedience is not only commanded by Hungarian constitutional law, but it is also subject to supranational review by the CJEU. This prevents selectivity.

The Hungarian situation therefore shows that, under certain conditions, substantive constitutional governance precedes strict constitutional formalism by requiring constitutional disobedience. When the practice is not framed as a political possibility but as a legal necessity, it is possible to move from abstract debates to tangible, enforceable standards. For political justifications for constitutional disobedience, while perhaps rhetorically powerful, are difficult to operationalise in institutional terms. A legal duty, in turn, enables national authorities to navigate the complex field of democratic rebuilding.

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Until a new constitution is adopted, one way to pursue constitutional and democratic reconstruction in Hungary is arguably through a dual strategy: the adoption of reconstructing pieces of legislation, including constitutional amendments, through procedurally demanding lawmaking processes capable of generating enhanced legitimacy and an EU-friendly reinterpretation of constitutional identity that accommodates the primacy of EU law. The first underscores the constitutional majority’s democratic commitment; the second more readily supports reintegration into European constitutional discourse after a period of detachment; and both serve as tools and constraints and can be employed together or separately. This interpretation and the use of the Fundamental Law should not be understood as a form of constitutional whitewashing. It does not make the Fundamental Law less illiberal overall. What is offered here is a pragmatic response to democratic concerns until a full constitutional replacement is feasible. Let’s start with a brief discussion of this issue before turning to questions of heightened democratic legitimacy and structural challenges.

EU-friendly interpretation of the Fundamental Law

A central starting point is that the Fundamental Law itself contains the constitutional resources for an EU-friendly reading of Hungary’s legal order. Its provisions on Hungary’s participation in the European Union authorize the joint exercise of certain constitutional competences through EU institutions and recognize that EU law may lay down generally binding rules of conduct (Article Q). At the same time, the Fundamental Law affirms Hungary’s obligation to ensure conformity with international law (Article Q) and defines the domestic hierarchy of legal acts without incorporating EU law into that hierarchy (Article T). These provisions make it possible to argue that EU law occupies a distinct place in the Hungarian legal system and may prevail where conflict arises. Critics might say that Article R (2) does not include the term “EU law”, when it establishes that “The Fundamental Law and the laws shall be binding on everyone”, therefore, EU law shall not be binding on everyone. Nevertheless, the careful reading of this paragraph, together with Article T), expresses that it is the Fundamental Law itself which establishes the binding nature of EU law. From this perspective, the prevalence of EU law does not follow from a norm external to the constitution, but from the way the Fundamental Law itself situates Hungary’s participation in the European legal order and the EU law within the domestic legal system. This reading is compatible with the Constitutional Court’s interpretation of the matter in 2019.

It is a commonplace in the literature on Hungary that the interpretation rules of the Fundamental Law (Article R) and its constitutional identity (Article E, National Avowal) were the cornerstones of entrenching autocratic and illiberal rule. Nevertheless, recent scholarship emphasizes the dynamic character of constitutional identity and how it can be mobilized through interpretation. The question, therefore, is whether the meaning of constitutional identity – read in light of the constitutional text and the Constitutional Court’s jurisprudence – can also support a non-abusive or non-illiberal interpretation. If Hungary’s constitutional identity is interpreted in a non-abusive manner, taking into account the EU clause, Hungary’s international obligations, and the historical and positive elements referenced in the National Avowal, as required by Article R(3), it can serve as a supporting argument for the primacy of EU law. On this interpretation, EU membership becomes a genuine constitutive element of constitutional identity, rather than a mere ornament or argument against it, which is itself what EU membership and the CJEU require.

Why not simply get rid of the provisions of constitutional identity? First, because they have become a constituent part of the Hungarian constitutional system and also the European constitutional discourse. Eliminating it from the text will not delete it from existence. Second, the approach advanced in this piece suggests that constitutional identity, as a dynamic and interpretive construct, can be mobilized to support Hungary’s reintegration into the European constitutional space.

With this interpretation, the explanatory memorandum accompanying any regime-change legislation, including constitutional amendments, could lend such laws greater constitutional legitimacy. Now, the question is how to enhance democratic legitimacy as well, to avoid the accusation of autocratic legalism.

Procedural legitimacy and reconstruction

Even if dismantling entrenched illiberal structures is legally possible, reconstruction efforts inevitably raise rule-of-law concerns. Measures adopted to restore democratic institutions may themselves appear to challenge legality, legal certainty, or institutional stability. In this situation, the legitimacy of reconstruction becomes inseparable from the quality of the lawmaking process. This is what the Venice Commission also recognized in its Updated Rule of Law Checklist.

Over the past decade, many of Hungary’s most consequential legal changes were adopted through accelerated legislative procedures that limited parliamentary debate, excluded meaningful consultation, and reduced transparency. European institutions and scholars have repeatedly criticized these practices for undermining democratic lawmaking and overall weakening the rule of law.

Democratic reconstruction, therefore, requires not only substantive reform but also a transformation of the legislative process itself. In reconstruction contexts, adopting laws through participatory, transparent, and evidence-based legislative procedures, with heightened expectations for public justification and parliamentary deliberation, can generate ex ante legitimacy for potentially contested reforms. In the case of a constitutional majority, such a process can elevate and further strengthen this legitimacy. Reforming the lawmaking process, in both design and practice, is legally possible and politically desirable, even if it may not seem to be the highest priority. Most constitutional systems, including the Hungarian, already contain procedural frameworks that can be strengthened or reactivated. Supranational and international standards are in place, even if scattered, which – as mentioned – already guide rule-of-law-consistent reconstruction efforts. Normative requirements based on constitutionalism and various theories, such as the militant rule of law, the democracy-friendly theory of the rule of law, and rule deviation, are available to support this move toward a potential constitutional interpretation of how the quality of the lawmaking process can be reconsidered in the context of reconstruction.

The procedural integrity of lawmaking thus functions as an additional safeguard for reconstruction reforms, strengthening and disciplining the exercise of the constitutional majority. It ensures that attempts to dismantle illiberal structures do not reproduce the procedural and democratic deficiencies through which those structures were originally established. Instead, it deepens democratic authorization and legitimacy by grounding the process in the principles of the rule of law, democracy, and human rights.

Key veto players as a structural uncertainty

The effectiveness of this dual strategy, however, is conditioned by institutional constraints that cannot be ignored. Most importantly, it relies, at the end of the day, on the captured Constitutional Court and the loyalist President, who must promulgate the laws.

Whether the Constitutional Court adopts such reasoning, of course, remains uncertain. It could continue to rely on its doctrines of interference in the legislative process on procedural grounds, or on the illiberal reading of constitutional identity. In such cases, it may feel compelled to strike down reconstruction legislation when it appears to conflict with rule-of-law principles or constitutional identity, even if such decisions ultimately hinder democratic reconstruction. In the case of the Hungarian Court, given its composition, it might even be a matter of meeting political expectations.

Nevertheless, judicial behavior in such environments is not entirely predictable. Opportunism, institutional self-preservation, and the prestige associated with serving as a constitutional court justice may influence judicial conduct. The Hungarian Constitutional Court’s own jurisprudence illustrates this ambiguity. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Court distanced itself from the government by refraining from fully endorsing restrictions on freedom of expression. Instead, it formulated constitutional requirements governing the application of the relevant legislation, thereby limiting its enforceability.

Similarly, even constitutional identity – as interpreted in decision 22/2016 (XII. 5) and 32/2021. (XII. 20.), which is often invoked in constitutional discourse with illiberal implications – does not necessarily have to remain confined to that interpretation. These decisions still allow EU- and international-law-consistent interpretations, which could leave room for the new reconstruction-oriented governments to justify the direction of reconstruction laws through public justification, emphasizing the primacy of EU law (as presented above), and for the Court to accept those arguments.

Yet, judicial responses remain uncertain. But uncertainty does not necessarily imply impossibility. Besides, this uncertainty makes the legitimacy of the lawmaking process even more important. Political decision-makers and other actors involved in the legislative process – including NGOs, human rights institutions, and the broader public – play a crucial role in ensuring that reconstruction reforms are adopted through procedurally legitimate processes grounded in demanding rule-of-law principles. This broad participation has democratic and political leverage. Moreover, the EU institutions will probably appreciate it as well considering its rule of law dimension. Finally, this participation may prove relevant when key constitutional actors, including the President, decide on promulgation or on a political or constitutional veto.

Péter Magyar, in his victory speech, called for the resignation of key constitutional actors, such as the President of the Republic, the presidents of the Constitutional Court and the Curia (supreme court), and the National Judicial Office. They might or might not do so. Nevertheless, a constitutional majority – either through a constitutional amendment or an ordinary piece of legislation – can be used to remove them or, with the exception of the President, reorganize their structure in a way that reduces their internal and external power and increases the independence of the renewed or restructured body. Whatever the choice, for the sake of constitutional and democratic reconstruction and in light of the responsible use of the highest level of voter authorization in Hungarian history, procedural legitimacy needs to go beyond mere reference to a two-thirds majority. It is especially true if the removal of these key veto players is planned to be effected by a constitutional amendment, which could potentially run counter to certain rule of law principles, such as legal certainty, legitimate expectations, and, in the case of the apex courts, paradoxically, judicial independence.

Constitutional and democratic reconstruction in Hungary will, for a while, inevitably operate under conditions of legal continuity and institutional constraints. A two-thirds majority creates the possibility of change, but it does not resolve the legitimacy dilemmas that such change entails. By combining an EU-consistent interpretation of the constitutional framework with a procedurally demanding approach to lawmaking, reconstruction can be anchored not only in electoral authorization but also in the principles of the rule of law, democracy, and human rights. In this sense, what matters is not only whether change is possible, but how it is carried out.

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The case before the Court involved a Colorado law prohibiting licensed counselors from attempting to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of a minor. Counselors could, however, assist minors who were undergoing gender transition. A licensed mental-health counselor, Kaley Chiles, challenged Colorado’s law because it permitted her to encourage gender transitions but not to oppose them. She contended that the law discriminated on the basis of viewpoint and thus violated her First Amendment right of freedom of speech.

The Court uncritically endorsed Chiles’ argument. It reasoned that “as a talk therapist, all Ms. Chiles does is speak with clients.” The Court condemned Colorado because it sought to regulate Chiles’s speech because of what she said. It did not matter that Chiles was a licensed professional doing her job. The First Amendment, said the Court, “protects the right of all” to speak as they will, including professionals. Colorado could not “suppress views Ms. Chiles wishes to express”; it could only regulate speech that was incidental to conduct, as for example by requiring informed consent before medical procedures. But here Colorado was simply regulating “speech as speech.”

Pulling out large rhetorical guns, the Court insisted that the First Amendment means “that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely” and that “the free marketplace of ideas” is “the best means for discovering truth.” “However well-intentioned,” the Court said, “any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an ‘egregious’ assault on both of those commitments.”

This reasoning is simply nonsense in the context of the professional speech that all of us rely on all the time.  We extend extraordinary protections to political speech, but not to the ordinary communications of professionals, which are routinely regulated. Take the case of lawyers. Lawyers do nothing but talk. They give advice; they advise clients on how to draw up wills, contracts, and other legal documents; they offer opinions on the legality of transactions; and so on. On the Court’s reasoning, to regulate these communications is to regulate “speech as speech.” Lawyers possess an inalienable constitutional right to communicate as they please because the marketplace of ideas will ensure that in the end truth will emerge. Hogwash.

At present, the speech of lawyers is governed by a framework of legal guardrails to ensure that their clients receive comprehensive, competent, and trustworthy advice. Lawyers are subject to licensing, discipline, malpractice liability, and fiduciary duties. These are all viewpoint-based limits on speech.  The state distinguishes competent from incompetent speech, subjecting the latter to the penalties of malpractice.

The state makes these viewpoint distinctions so that clients can rely on the advice of their lawyers. There is no marketplace of ideas between clients and lawyers. If Justice Gorsuch, who wrote the Court’s opinion, were to consult his lawyer to draft a will, and if (God forbid) his lawyer were to commit professional malpractice by drawing up an invalid will, and if Justice Gorsuch were to sue his lawyer, the incompetent lawyer could not defend by invoking the marketplace of ideas.

Gorsuch’s lawyer could not claim, as Justice Holmes asserted in defining the marketplace of ideas, that the proposed will was “an experiment, as all life is an experiment.” Gorsuch did not visit his lawyer to engage in abstract debate. He did not care about the eventual emergence of truth. He had important business to transact, the crafting of a workable will.

The law currently protects Gorsuch’s expectations. But now, after his ill-considered opinion in the Colorado case, all that is open to question. We doubt whether the Court would make such an obvious error were it not so anxious to strike yet another blow in its ongoing war against protections for LGBTQ lives. The Court has increasingly conscripted the First Amendment into that assault, without apparent consideration of the consequences.

Like lawyers, the professional life of accountants, engineers, and architects transpires through speech. Much of what doctors do also occurs through the medium of speech. States require licensing and pervasively regulate professionals because society cares that their speech be competent. Clients and patients ought to be able to rely on the speech of professionals. They should be able to expect more than just speculation. They should receive reliable advice grounded in competent expertise. And, if things go wrong, they ought to be able to hold professionals accountable.

This is what the entire framework of professional regulation exists to guarantee. This is what the Court has just thrown into doubt.

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The New Trans Rights Act reorganises the terms on which transgender lives become intelligible to law. Its animating logic, that trans identity is an “acquirable characteristic” the state must verify rather than an irreducible human experience it must recognise, directly confronts the constitutional architecture erected by the Indian Supreme Court in previous case law. The Act re-medicalises identity, re-bureaucratises recognition, and risks criminalising both community kinship (guru/chela) structures and legitimate gender-affirming care.

Who is a “transgender person”?

Under the existing Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 (“2019 Act”), a transgender person was defined as “a person whose gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at birth”, broad, inclusive of trans men, trans women, genderqueer persons, and persons with intersex variations, and expressly independent of surgical or hormonal intervention. Section 4(2) codified the right to self-perceived gender identity. The New Trans Rights Act removes both.

The new definition of ‘transgender person’ proceeds in two limbs. The first covers only persons with named socio-cultural identities (kinner, hijra, aravani, jogta, eunuch), persons with specified intersex variations, and persons forcibly compelled to assume a transgender identity through mutilation or surgical, chemical, or hormonal procedures. The second limb is a proviso that excludes persons with “self-perceived sexual identities.” This is a form of indirect discrimination within the trans community, wherein the hierarchy of recognisability is artificially created by privileging identities that are either culturally codified or medically verifiable over those that are self-perceived.

Trans men, trans women, non-binary persons, and genderqueer individuals, none of whom necessarily belong to the named socio-cultural communities and none of whom necessarily present intersex variations, are excised from the statute entirely. They constitute a substantial portion of persons who have historically sought certificates of identity under the 2019 Act and who face documented discrimination in education, employment, and healthcare.

This narrowing stands in tension with decades of scholarship demonstrating that gender-variant identities in South Asia are neither fixed nor reducible to discrete socio-cultural categories. Hijra identities themselves are internally diverse, religiously syncretic, and historically fluid (see Reddy and Loh), while the imposition of rigid classificatory frameworks often reflects colonial and postcolonial state logics rather than lived realities (see Dutta & Roy). It also stands in direct contradiction to NALSA’s foundational holding that “transgender” is an umbrella term embracing a wide range of identities and experiences, and that any attempt to confine it to specific socio-cultural communities imports precisely the classificatory errors the Court sought to dismantle (see NALSA, para 19; para 81 (Sikri J.)).

The State’s justification for the narrowing rests on three grounds: (a) that the prior definition was “vague,” (b) that it made it “impossible to identify the genuine oppressed persons,” and (c) that it was incompatible with several existing statutory enactments. Each ground fails on examination. The vagueness argument misunderstands gender identity. Identity is not vague; it is complex, because it is internally experienced rather than externally observable. NALSA engaged precisely this complexity and concluded that self-determination, not medical verification, was the constitutionally appropriate response (see NALSA, para 19). To call self-determination a source of vagueness is to restate the biomedical premise the Court rejected. The impossibility argument is contradicted by the data,  i.e., over 32,000 certificates had been issued as of March 2026 with 5,566 rejected applications, demonstrating a functioning, not unworkable, system. The incompatibility argument is the most constitutionally dangerous, for it recasts rights-bearing identity as administratively suspect. The Statement of Objects and Reasons asserts that a statute conferring rights cannot define its beneficiary class by reference to an “acquirable” characteristic. Applied consistently, this logic would undermine every protective statute defining its beneficiaries by reference to religion, belief, or disability. What is presented as a technical objection is, in substance, an argument against rights themselves.

The inclusion of persons “forcibly compelled” to assume a transgender identity as a definitional category of transgender persons is analytically incoherent. Such persons are victims of abduction and bodily harm, not transgender persons in any meaningful sense. Their inclusion conflates identity with victimisation and stigmatises the entire category by associating transgender identity with coercion and violence. It also produces a legal absurdity. A person forcibly castrated and compelled to present as a hijra, even though hijra identity is constituted not by bodily presentation but by community membership, kinship, and social belonging, qualifies under the new definition, while a trans man who has lived his gender identity for decades, sought no surgery, and belongs to no named socio-cultural community, does not. This conflation echoes anthropological misreadings that collapsed hijra identity into practices of emasculation (see Hossain), ignoring its social, ritual, and kinship dimensions (see Nanda).

The Medical Board as Gatekeeper

The New Trans Rights Act inserts a new provision, i.e., Section 2(aa), which defines an “authority” as a medical board headed by a Chief Medical Officer or Deputy Chief Medical Officer. By amending Section 6 of the 2019 Act, the District Magistrate is now required to examine the recommendation of this authority before issuing a certificate of identity. The District Magistrate may also take the assistance of “other medical experts.” The 2020 Trans Rights Rules, enacted under the 2019 Act, had expressly clarified that no medical or physical examination would be required as a precondition to the issuance of a certificate.  The New Trans Rights Act reverses this entirely.

The change may appear procedural. It is not. In NALSA, the Court held that self-determination of gender identity falls within personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution, and directed legal recognition without conditioning it on medical procedures. (see NALSA, para 69 and para 74). This holding was subsequently affirmed in Navtej Singh Johar, where the Court grounded the right to identity in “individual autonomy and liberty, equality for all sans discrimination of any kind, recognition of identity with dignity” as the “cardinal constitutional ideals” (see Navtej, para 3, Majority Opinion). Where the 2019 Act treated self-declaration as the trigger for administrative processing, the New Trans Rights Act places a medical board between the person and the state. Recognition is now conditional on institutional validation. A right has become a permission.

The medical board model also carries a structural constitutional problem visible in another domain. Persons with disabilities in India have long experienced the perverse consequences of medical boards applying inconsistent standards, the same individual receiving different disability percentages from different boards, with real consequences for education and employment. The analogy is instructive: where identity or entitlement is mediated through expert certification, arbitrariness becomes structural rather than exceptional. As Rahul Bajaj notes, in Vikash Kumar v. UPSC, the Supreme Court directly addressed the misuse justification for restricting disability facilities. Its response was unequivocal: the mere possibility of misuse cannot justify denying a benefit to an entire class. The same logic compelled this Court in Navtej to hold that the existence of Section 377, justified on the same speculative misuse rationale, was unconstitutional (see Navtej, para 95). The New Trans Rights Act’s implicit justification, preventing fraudulent identity claims, founders on exactly this reasoning. The Statement of Objects and Reasons identifies no specific, documented pattern of fraud under the 2019 Act. Speculative misuse cannot justify systemic exclusion.

There is a deeper epistemological problem. The new definition retains socio-cultural identities, hijra, kinner, aravani, jogta, alongside intersex variations, but a medical board can assess only the latter. Whether a person belongs to the hijra socio-cultural community requires engagement with community history, lived experience, and social belonging, questions for which medical expertise is the wrong instrument. NALSA itself acknowledged this when it observed that hijras “belong to a distinct socio-religious and cultural group” whose identity is determined not by biology but by social belonging (see NALSA, para 70).

The Surveillance of Trans Bodies

The New Trans Rights Act also amends the mandatory hospital reporting requirement in Section 7 in two ways. The word “may” is replaced with “shall,” making it mandatory for persons who undergo gender-affirming surgery to apply for a revised certificate. A new sub-section 1A requires medical institutions to furnish details of such persons to the District Magistrate and the authority.

The mandatory disclosure requirement raises serious concerns about the right to privacy. State interference with privacy must be backed by law, serve a legitimate state aim, and be proportionate. The first condition is met. The other two are not. The Statement of Objects and Reasons identifies no legitimate aim served by requiring hospitals to report gender-affirming surgeries to district authorities. The Amendment’s overall orientation, toward verification and control of who qualifies as transgender, suggests the aim is surveillance rather than welfare. The Yogyakarta Principles, which NALSA expressly adopted as a framework, specifically prohibit compelling any person to “undergo medical procedures, including surgery, sterilization or hormonal therapy” as a condition of legal recognition, and equally prohibit state surveillance of gender identity as a condition of protection (see NALSA, para 22; Yogyakarta Principle 18) Mass surveillance of a constitutionally protected characteristic cannot constitute a legitimate state aim under Puttaswamy. India’s data protection law further requires consent for processing personal health data, a requirement the mandatory reporting provision bypasses without justification.

The practical consequence is a chilling effect on access to care. Trans persons who would otherwise seek legitimate medical transition may avoid hospitals to evade state reporting, being driven toward unregulated and unsafe alternatives. In Navtej, the Court expressly recognised that the existence of provisions targeting LGBT persons, regardless of enforcement, produces a chilling effect that “builds insecurity and vulnerability into the daily lives” of those communities. The surveillance apparatus, ostensibly protective, may function to harm.

The New Offences and Their Paradoxes

The substituted Section 18 adds serious new offences: kidnapping combined with grievous hurt to force assumption of transgender identity attracts ten years to life for adults and mandatory life imprisonment for children; forcing a person to present as transgender and engage in begging or servitude attracts five to ten years for adults and ten to fourteen years for children. The State justification, addressing documented abduction and forced bodily modification, is not without foundation or any data. But the provisions as drafted are simultaneously over-inclusive and under-inclusive.

The gharana system, the structured kinship network of guru and chela that organises community life for hijra, kinner, and related groups, has historically been the primary social safety net for gender non-conforming persons abandoned by natal families (see Goel). The new offences in clauses 18(e) to 18(h) are structured around “allurement,” “inducement,” “deception,” and “compulsion”, undefined and elastic terms. Gharanas, the only home many trans persons have known, could be mischaracterised as sites of allurement or inducement, exposing community leaders to prosecution for acts of bona fide care. Police in India have historically harassed hijra communities under vagrancy provisions. New legislative categories carrying life imprisonment will not be applied with greater discernment. As Gopi Shankar Madurai observes, the new clauses target external perpetrators while leaving internal exploitative hierarchies untouched, effectively legitimising the exploitative dimensions of established community structures while criminalising the protective ones.

The inclusion of “surgical, chemical, or hormonal procedures” within “grievous hurt” risks criminalising legitimate gender-affirming care. Medical professionals assisting voluntary transitions may fear prosecution under provisions not clearly confined to coercive contexts. The concern extends further: hormonal procedures prescribed for polycystic ovary syndrome, menopause, or cancer fall within the literal language of the provision. The phrase “outwardly present a transgender identity” compounds this by treating transgender identity as a performance, something one can be compelled to do rather than something one is. NALSA held that “values of privacy, self-identity, autonomy and personal integrity are fundamental rights guaranteed to members of the transgender community under Article 19(1)(a)” (see NALSA, para 66). Reducing identity to an “outward presentation” enshrines in criminal law the stereotype that trans identity is a choice of appearance, precisely the stereotype that has sustained centuries of stigma and violence against trans communities.

Finally, the asymmetry in penalties exposes the Amendment’s true priorities. The existing offences,  physical abuse, sexual abuse, and forced displacement of transgender persons retain a two-year maximum sentence, a sentence community advocates have challenged as grossly inadequate. The Amendment creates life imprisonment as maximum punishment for forcing a child to present as transgender (Section 18(e)(f), but leaves at two years the maximum for sexually or physically abusing a transgender person (Section 18(d). The legislation is more concerned with managing the boundaries of transgender identity than with protecting transgender lives.

Conclusion

The Trans Rights Act arrives at a moment when India’s constitutional jurisprudence on gender identity, rooted in NALSA and awaiting elaboration in the pending challenge to Section 7 of the 2019 Act, was poised to move forward. Instead, it re-medicalises identity, re-bureaucratises recognition, and narrows protection at the precise moment the community needed welfare, upliftment, and expansion of rights. The state’s interest in precise definitions and administrative clarity is legitimate, but the Trans Rights Act pursues it at the direct expense of protection, treating identity, that most intimate of human attributes, as a claim requiring verification rather than a person requiring recognition. The Constitution still stands. So does the directive in NALSA. Whether courts will act on that directive remains to be seen, but the legislative record is now clear, and it is not a flattering one.

Disclaimer: The post was submitted before the bill was passed.

The post State Bodies appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

I don't know all the legal and diplomatic consequences that flow from calling the Iran operation a blockade instead of a quarantine. As an Admiralty teacher, all I can say is that acts of war trigger mutual exceptions or force majeure is most maritime contracts.  

This asymmetry raises a broader question that has increasingly gained attention in policy and academic debates: can generative AI applications be brought within the scope of the DSA, for instance as very large online platforms (VLOPs) or search engines (VLOSEs)?

We argue that applying the DSA – or an ad hoc regime based on the DSA – to generative AI (GenAI) could prove beneficial to address the risks posed by GenAI.

Is the DSA a good fit for GenAI?

Chatbots powered by generative AI are a real brain teaser when it comes to mapping the applicable EU legal framework. They stand out as a new service with its own distinctive features, but they also functionally resemble other services that are already regulated under EU law. Generative AI applications can exhibit platform-like features and offer users functionalities that are comparable to those of online search engines. However, they are difficult to fit within pre-existing legal categories.

The DSA is premised on the well-established categorization of intermediary services crafted by the e-Commerce Directive (Directive 2000/31/EC): mere conduit, caching, and hosting services. The DSA has never departed from the underlying assumption that those regulated under its umbrella are intermediary services, to which a special liability regime for third-party content is granted. Historically, the reason why intermediary service providers were granted a special regime lies in the absence of editorial control, which marks the difference between them and content providers such as publishers. Accordingly, they are not subject to general monitoring obligations in respect of such content, nor do they incur liability for any illegal content published by their users, unless they fail to comply with the notice-and-action mechanism.

When assessing whether some GenAI applications can fall under the DSA, one should take these rationales into account and assess whether the way GenAI applications work is aligned with the structural paradigm of intermediary services. In this regard, one can notice more than a mere divergence.

Anatomy of a service

A first common feature of intermediary services is that the information they transmit or store is provided by a recipient of the service. Social networks or user-generated content platforms, for example, only store content posted or uploaded by their users, consistently with their curational but never editorial role. As noted by Edwards et al., however, GenAI applications do not match this characteristic: the only information provided by the recipients of the service is the prompt used to ask for a specific task to be performed, while the output returned is AI-generated (albeit user-prompted).

This first problem shifts our analysis towards a second issue, namely whether the production of AI-generated output consists of a genuinely creative activity (Bassini; Lopes-Bassini). Qualifying the operation of GenAI applications as content creation would trigger significant obstacles to the application of the DSA. These systems would de facto operate as content providers, which fall beyond the scope of intermediary service providers and therefore do not enjoy the special liability regime.

Hybrids between online search engines and online platforms

Despite these conceptual difficulties, scholars have reflected upon the suitability of the categories of VLOPs and VLOSEs to capture GenAI providers with a remarkable market presence.

Emphasizing that the notion of online search engine under Art. 3(j) DSA is agnostic to the format in which ‘‘information related to the requested content can be found’’ and returned, Botero Arcila has maintained that some GenAI applications, such as LLMs, could already fall under the relevant category. In accordance with this view, Schaal, Lenne and Akinyemi equally support ChatGPT’s designation as a VLOSE, as Art. 3(j) would encompass ‘‘services that retrieve and synthesise web information at scale, regardless of whether they return traditional link lists’’. Lorente and Gardhouse, in turn, have argued that ChatGPT falls under the DSA as an online search engine but should more properly be considered as a hybrid between an online search engine and an online platform. The latter, however, acknowledge that GenAI applications do not meet a requirement for online platforms, namely that they engage in the dissemination to the public of the information they host. Lorente and Gardhouse underscore that the requirement is not met for user prompts, but questions may arise on whether they genuinely ‘‘disseminate to the public’’ also the output they generate.

More generally, a key challenge remains as to whether hosting content that GenAI applications generate themselves would not deprive the providers of their role as intermediaries, also in light of the concept of ‘active hosting provider’ in the pre-DSA age.

A stick-and-carrot approach

Even if the DSA might not be a very well-fitting dress for GenAI applications, its application and enforcement could still prove beneficial.

The AI Act does not bring much clarity to its relationship with the DSA, and Recitals 118 and 119 only address the coordination of the respective risk management frameworks, without suggesting any solution regarding the content moderation regime. Despite the conceptual tensions outlined above, there are practical reasons to consider applying the DSA to GenAI applications, regardless of whether they are integrated into digital services or operated as standalone solutions. We believe that this conclusion would derive from a ‘‘stick-and-carrot’’ approach (Botero Arcila; Hacker et al.; Bassini).

As to the ‘‘stick’’ component, the DSA offers a set of risk-governance mechanisms designed to address the societal risks associated with large-scale information services. Trusted flaggers, transparency obligations, and systemic risk assessments provide tools to identify and mitigate harmful and illegal content.

Extending similar mechanisms to GenAI providers could help address the risks associated with AI-generated content, including disinformation, defamation, and other forms of illegal or harmful speech. It would be paradoxical if such mechanisms were applied to VLOPs integrating AI components into their services (such as in the case of X and Grok) – as the recent Commission investigation suggests – and were conversely excluded in the case of other GenAI applications simply because they operate as standalone solutions.

But there is also a ‘‘carrot’’ component, which lies in the favorable liability regime for illegal content. It could be disputed that such content qualifies as ‘‘third-party’’ when it is generated by AI systems on the basis of prompts input by the recipients of the service. However, this solution could mitigate the burden of applying risk governance obligations for systems with a large market presence (and presumably designated as VLOPs or VLOSEs). Overall, it would align the status of GenAI providers with that of hosting providers.

This scenario could represent a pragmatic solution. Even if generative systems do not neatly fit within the intermediary taxonomy, the combination of notice-and-action procedures and systemic risk obligations could strengthen accountability and facilitate the moderation of problematic outputs.

Why applying the DSA would matter

As discussed above, the ‘‘stick’’ component of a stick-and-carrot approach would entail applying the DSA risk management obligations to GenAI. It may be argued that GenAI already has its own systemic risk management regime, the one applicable to providers of general-purpose AI models (GPAIMs) under the AI Act.

The implementation of this regime may also intersect with the systemic risk framework established under the DSA, as acknowledged in Recitals 118 to 120 DSA. However, despite the apparent convergence suggested by these recitals, the two regimes are not equivalent. Systemic risk management under the DSA and the AI Act differs in at least three fundamental respects: the protected interests, the mechanisms through which risks materialize and propagate, and the scope of the regulated entities and services. Therefore, they cannot always lead to the same risk mitigation measures, even when GenAI applications pose systemic risks comparable to those that the DSA aims to tackle.

The main difference to note is that systemic risk management under the AI Act applies to providers and their models before the latter are integrated into other systems and applications downstream in the value chain. GPAIMs, especially large language models, are the backbones of several GenAI applications, but they are just a component of such applications. Other components, in particular the user interface, are also key to their functioning and ultimately shape the risks that they pose. Risk management at the model level does not encompass risks posed by these components and their interaction with GPAIMs. Taking the example of chatbots that can encourage self-harm practices, safeguards need to be implemented not only for the underlying large language model, but also in the user interface. At the model level, risk mitigation measures can include adversarial testing to evaluate how the model reacts to prompts about self-harm and suicide, conducting monitoring and incident reporting, and introducing or improving safety filters and restrictions on output. Nonetheless, safeguards are also needed in the user interface, such as providing warnings to users, interrupting the service, and/or contacting emergency services when risky situations materialize. Similarly, model-level constraints can greatly mitigate the risk of deepfakes being generated by the model, but restrictions will also need to be applied, both contractually and technologically, at the system level through output filtering.

Systemic risk management for GPAIMs can thus only address some of the risks posed by generative AI. This does not preclude the possibility that providers of GPAIMs may mitigate systemic risks by anticipating risks that can arise in downstream applications. The very definition of systemic risks in the AI Act requires considering negative effects ‘‘that can be propagated at scale across the value chain’’. This requirement can contribute to more effective risk mitigation but cannot replace risk management specifically targeting the downstream application. Therefore, the lack of system-level risk management leaves a gap in mitigating the risks posed by GenAI applications – a gap that the DSA could close.

Conclusion

The governance model of the AI Act for GPAIMs seems to build on the idea that they are core infrastructures of broader systems in which they are integrated. It thus regulates GPAIMs as core infrastructures to mitigate cascade risks in the downstream value chain, mainly through transparency and risk management requirements. In the travaux préparatoires for the AI Act, the Council referred to the risks posed by certain GPAIMs for democratic processes and public health through the dissemination of disinformation, echoing the concerns underpinning the DSA’s systemic risk management regime.

While applying the DSA to GenAI applications is not free from legal uncertainty, it could nevertheless prove beneficial. It would make risk governance obligations binding in exchange for a more favorable liability regime; in this way, it avoids imposing strict liability on GenAI providers for content that is, by its nature, generated by a black box, while inviting scholars and policymakers to reconsider the well-established service provider vs. content provider dichotomy in light of the characteristics of GenAI applications. Derogating from a strict liability regime also appears to be a wise move in a Europe in search of digital competitiveness. Beyond entities that may be designated as VLOPs or VLOSEs, such an approach would be particularly beneficial for small and medium-sized operators that do not meet the threshold for designation as very large online platforms or search engines.

The post Beyond Intermediaries appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

When situating the popular rejection of the reform and its political consequences in the broader Italian political context, and, specifically, in the context of the ongoing erosion of the Rule of Law in Italy, it goes too far to conclude, as some commentators have, that the reform would have pushed Italy in a direction similar to Hungary’s. However, the outcome of the referendum indeed does say something about the current state of Italian democracy. While the Italian judicial system faces significant issues, this reform failed to address them. It was neither the solution Italy needed, nor the one the country deserved.

Setting the Scene

The procedural framework for the referendum is anchored in Article 138 of the Italian Constitution, which mandates a popular vote for constitutional amendments under specific conditions. Specifically, if a reform is approved by an absolute majority but fails to secure a two-thirds majority in both Houses, it may be subject to a referendum within three months of its publication upon the request of one-fifth of the members of either chamber, 500,000 electors, or five Regional Councils. Crucially, the amendment remains unpromulgated unless it receives the endorsement of a simple majority of valid votes, as no quorum of participation is required.

Within legal scholarship, the essence of this consultative mechanism remains a subject of rigorous debate. The fundamental question is whether the vote acts as a “confirmatory” validation of the parliamentary will or, conversely, an “oppositional” instrument. The latter interpretation is particularly compelling: it frames the referendum not as a rubber stamp for the government, but as a strategic safeguard allowing political and social minorities to veto a constitutional shift that would otherwise take effect by default.

What exactly was at stake: a brief overview of the failed reform

The reform which was rejected at the ballot boxes had two main aims (for an overview in English see here, here, and here). The first was to formally separate judicial and prosecutorial careers, creating two distinct career tracks. The second was to reform the modalities for the appointment of the members of the Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM).

As to the first aspect (the separation of the adjudicating and prosecutorial careers), the reform would have definitively overturned the organization of the Italian judiciary, which was traditionally rooted in a “unitary” architecture, where judges and public prosecutors are part of a single, indistinguishable corps. This shared institutional identity begins at the entry level, through a common competitive examination and a unified training process and is reflected in the existence of a single constitutional body responsible for the judiciary self-government, the CSM. While the system originally drew inspiration from the French Napoleonic model during the Unification of Italy, the two paths diverged sharply in the post-war era. Unlike their French counterparts – who remain formally under the executive aegis of the Ministry of Justice – Italian prosecutors have gradually achieved a constitutional status (pursuant to Article 107) that is functionally equivalent to that of the sitting judiciary, ensuring their independence from political oversight.

Against this background, the reform would have formally separated the judicial and prosecutorial careers, consequently splitting the currently single Superior Council of the Judiciary into two distinct and separate bodies, one for judges, the other for prosecutors. In this regard, it should be noted that already under the current system, there is a separation of functions. Resulting from reforms introduced through ordinary legislation under the Draghi government, while the judicial career is unitary, it is extremely difficult to change the roles. Moreover, magistrates are generally not allowed to switch between adjudication and prosecution, except in very rare, exceptional cases. Such a framework was introduced with the aim of ensuring impartiality by preventing judges from having previously served as prosecutors.

Secondly, the reform would have deeply reformed the appointment system for the two CSMs. Under the reform, members would have been appointed through a lottery system replacing the traditional elections by Parliament and the judiciary: one-third of the members would have been randomly selected (by draw) from a list of law professors and senior lawyers compiled by Parliament. The remaining two-thirds would have been selected by lot from judges or prosecutors. In both cases, the constitutional reform deferred to subsequent legislation, at the same time providing virtually no guidance on how the legislature would have to regulate this radically innovative procedure, leaving many blank spots in very delicate and potentially problematic areas. For example, the reform said nothing about the modalities of the parliamentary deliberation on the list from which to select at random the members of the CSMs, failing to address issues such as the guarantees for involving parliamentary minorities and the length of the list itself.

Now, a formal separation between judicial and prosecuting magistrates’ careers is not inherently implausible or constitutionally inconceivable. In fact, the Constitutional Court – most notably in its decision permitting a referendum on the issue (Judgment no. 58/2022) – had already recognized that such a separation could, in principle, be compatible with the existing constitutional order.

However, the reform would have introduced specific mechanisms that generated considerable criticism: these contentious features, together with the political context, largely accounted for the outright rejection of the reform. Chief among these was the creation of a dedicated body – the High Disciplinary Court – tasked with imposing disciplinary measures, whose partial selection by lot appeared, to many commentators, difficult to justify in light of coherent institutional design principles. This constitutional referendum served as a crucial litmus test for a government currently managing another major constitutional overhaul: the so-called premierato (the direct election of the Prime Minister). Had the justice reform passed, the government might have accelerated this second reform; however, it is now possible that the premierato will drop off the executive’s agenda, at least until the 2027 general elections.

Is Italy a democracy in crisis?

In the recently published V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report, Italy was categorized among the so-called “Autocratizing Countries”, a classification influenced in part by the security-focused legislation introduced by the Meloni government. This leads us to consider the claim that Italy may currently be experiencing democratic backsliding. However, we do not believe that Italian democracy is currently more at risk than others – a sentiment that the outcome of the constitutional referendum itself seems to validate. Indeed, the turnout figures provide compelling evidence of a robust and engaged civil society. The robust voter turnout caught many by surprise, especially when measured against the previous four constitutional consultations. Historically, participation in constitutional referendums in Italy has been inconsistent; for instance, in 2001, turnout dipped significantly to 34,05%. However, the recent trend in Italy – across general, local, European elections, and abrogative referendums – has been one of steadily increasing abstentionism. Consequently, many analysts initially assumed that a lower turnout (projected around 55%) would benefit the “Yes” vote.

This unexpected surge in engagement represents a significant shift following a long period of civic disengagement. Yet, such high participation inevitably framed the referendum as a political litmus test. The final outcome is, in part, a reflection of growing opposition to the Meloni government. While the executive had previously enjoyed a period of notable stability, its late-campaign rhetoric, stressing the alleged “hyper-politicization” of the judiciary, likely galvanized the electorate. Ultimately, the divide between the two camps largely mirrored traditional party affiliations, with only a few significant deviations.

This, of course, does not suggest that Italy is free from issues concerning the administration of justice, as the 2025 Rule of Law Report highlights. On the contrary, there are highly compelling questions arising from reforms introduced or announced by the Meloni government, as well as from the country’s long-standing structural challenges, first and foremost the excessive length of judicial proceedings, with civil and commercial cases taking on average six years to resolve. This keeps Italy under enhanced supervision by the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers.

The Meloni government has introduced or announced several controversial reforms. Decree-law no. 48 of 11 April 2025 was adopted as an emergency measure pursuant to Article 77 of the Constitution. A decree-law is a legislative instrument enacted under conditions of necessity and urgency that must be converted into law by Parliament within 60 days (as occurred in this case thanks to Law no. 80 of 9 June 2025); otherwise, it lapses retroactively (ex tunc). This act, as already noted on this Blog, mandated urgent public security measures, relying heavily on criminal law: new offences, harsher penalties, and expanded police powers in urban spaces and detention centers. Controversial provisions include the offence of possessing material for terrorist purposes, criminalization of online dissemination of violent instructions, stricter anti-squatting rules with immediate eviction powers, and reinforced preventive controls.

Media pluralism is at risk, with concerns over RAI (Italy’s public broadcaster)’s independence, stalled defamation reform, restricted access to judicial information, and ongoing threats to and intimidation of journalists, including strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP). Institutional issues include the frequent use of emergency decrees, the absence of a National Human Rights Institution, and potential civil liberties implications of the new security law. According to the 2025 Media Pluralism Monitor, the most problematic area remains the status and protection of journalists. High-profile political figures, including government members, are becoming more involved in initiating both civil and criminal defamation proceedings against journalists.

Precarious working conditions for freelance journalists, rising threats and intimidation and shortcomings in source protection and cases of surveillance underscore ongoing vulnerabilities. Critics claim new restrictions on media coverage of ongoing judicial proceedings, justified as protecting the presumption of innocence, limit access to judicial information. Commentators raise concerns about university autonomy.

A proposed bill provides for the appointment by the Minister of Education of one member of the university board of directors (CDA), which could undermine institutional independence.

The government has granted anti-abortion activists access to counselling centers, subtly intruding into women’s private lives without altering the legal right to abortion under Law 194/1978 (see Alber and Malfertheiner). While these measures formally preserve the secular nature of these centers, they facilitate ideological influence aligned with the government. Access to abortion services in Italy has become increasingly difficult. The government has opposed progressive social reforms, including marriage equality and gender recognition for LGBTQIA+ individuals, contributing to Italy’s low ranking on LGBTQIA+ rights. In October 2024, Law 169/2024 extended its ban on surrogacy, by making it a crime for Italians to access surrogacy abroad (even in countries where surrogacy is legal), further limiting the rights of LGBTQIA+ families and complicating legal recognition of their children.

Thus, overall, the Meloni Government has overseen more subtle regressions in rights, reflecting a gradual weakening of democratic norms.

Conclusion

While Italy has remained untainted by overt “court-packing” strategies, its judiciary has nonetheless faced years of intense scrutiny and hostility. A more alarming trend, however, lies in the erosion of public discourse and the legislative shifts marked by the Meloni government’s “security decrees”. This legislative climate is further exacerbated by the dehumanizing language often adopted by government officials regarding the migration crisis. Beneath these symptoms lies a systemic failure: a deep-seated crisis of traditional political parties, rooted in a national culture that historically perceives partisan organizations as catalysts for corruption and national division.

Is Italian constitutional democracy truly at a breaking point? The reality suggests a system in poor health – a condition that predates the current executive. While this institutional strain has not yet culminated in an outright democratic backsliding, the appearance of significant structural cracks suggests that the status quo is increasingly fragile.

The post Neither What Italy Needed, Nor What it Deserved appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Ten years ago, the illiberal Hungarian government began its campaign against the Central European University (CEU). Back then, I was asked at a conference in Budapest: “Andrea, what will happen to you now?” The colleague who asked the question did not have me in mind, but CEU. He was a well-paid, enthusiastically loyal Fidesz apparatchik. Later, as FIDESZ moved further to the far right, he became a so-called “Fidesz orphan”, and now, in 2026, he is an advisor to the Respect and Freedom Party (TISZA), a typical example of pragmatic careerism. I replied at the time: “We’ll leave Budapest, we’ll live splendidly in Vienna, the world’s most livable city, and when everything here collapses, we’ll come back and rebuild what can be rebuilt.” I already knew back then that the System of National Cooperation, as the illiberal state built by FIDESZ is called, would eventually collapse, since no country can be run for long without professional expertise.

And here we are now: the Hungarian elections are only a couple of hours away. Péter Magyar, the leader of the opposition, is leading the polls with a serious advantage. My 2017 forecast is becoming a reality.

In the case of the collapse, I was right: other public institutions, including those in higher education and research, have indeed collapsed. However, doubts remain regarding another question: how this system is to be rebuilt.  These doubts are well-grounded with respect to Magyar’s program. So far, his stated goal is to restore the autonomy of both the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the universities, that is, to restore the pre-Fidesz status quo.

But is it possible – and, more importantly, is it necessary – to restore what has been destroyed in the past 16 years?

If a two-thirds constitutional majority for TISZA does indeed come about, Hungarian academia and higher education will still stand before a historic opportunity to build a new system more appropriate for the 21st century rather than restore the old one. This rethinking is important, as restoring what – and more importantly: those who ran these institutions –  proved so vulnerable to illiberal attacks, makes little sense. As illiberal politicians and voters, and, more importantly, the business and geopolitical interests attached to them, will not disappear after the election, neither will the illiberal desire to control higher education, resources, knowledge production, authorization, and dissemination suddenly evaporate. Higher education and research should therefore be better prepared this time.

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Editor’s Pick

by MAXIMILIAN STEINBEIS

The other day, whilst browsing the more obscure corners of Netflix in search of opportunities to watch Arabic films with subtitles, I stumbled upon a series that ranks among the most bizarre and amusing things I’ve seen recently (all the more so on that rather bleak platform): Masameer hails from Saudi Arabia, originally aired on YouTube, and was enormously popular there. It’s not difficult to see why: beneath the leaden blanket of authoritarianism, a society becomes visible, an unjust, undisciplined, unintimidated society that can both mock and indict itself with equal relish – the pig-headed ignorance of its billionaires’ sons, the unshakeable incompetence of its bureaucrats, the brutal cynicism of its criminals, the desperate resilience of the have-nots on its margins. It’s a few years old now, this series, the product of a happier decade. Its producer, Abdulaziz al-Muzaini, was apparently sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2024.

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The Week on Verfassungsblog

summarised by EVA MARIA BREDLER

Over Easter, our newsletter took a one-week break. Whether you spent that time orbiting the moon or simply lying in the sun trying to ignore the possibility of a third world war – quite a lot has happened. Let’s begin.

On Sunday, Hungary will elect a new parliament. At the moment, the signs are turning against Orbán: Fidesz’s main challenger, the centre-right party Tisza, could – after 16 years of Orbán – even achieve a two-thirds constitutional majority. While this might allow a new government to rebuild democratic institutions, it would also face very few meaningful institutional constraints, says ZOLTÁN ÁDÁM (ENG), and warns that populism should not be overcome with populism.

Institutional control for Hungary often comes from Luxembourg: the CJEU has now ruled that the refusal to renew the broadcasting licence of the government-critical radio station Klubrádió is incompatible with media freedom and pluralism. MELINDA RUCZ (ENG) shows how the Court quietly shifts its case law on media freedom through this judgment.

In another historic ruling, the CJEU has for the first time called for a new “legislative framework” to remedy the problem of irregularly appointed judges in Poland’s judicial system. It took more than 50 (!) preliminary references to get there. Until Poland adopts such a law, these judges attached to ordinary courts may only be recused on a case-by-case basis. LAURENT PECH (ENG) explains this uneasy compromise.

Also historic: the UN General Assembly has declared the trafficking and enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity. For LUIS ESLAVA (ENG), the Declaration is more than symbolic: it challenges how international law understands time, responsibility and reparations. Slavery, he argues, is not over – it continues to shape the present.

One need not look far to see such continuities. Consider Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which seeks to deny US citizenship to children if their mothers are not citizens and are either undocumented or only temporarily lawfully present in the country, and if the father also lacks permanent residence status. After Wednesday’s oral argument, it seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will support Trump this time. Yet ANJA BOSSOW (ENG) explains why that would still amount to a Pyrrhic victory.

Continuities of the gravest crimes against humanity can also be found in US foreign policy. Since the end of January, the United States has effectively blocked Cuba’s oil imports through sanctions and tariffs – with catastrophic humanitarian consequences. Not only hospitals, but also water supply, food distribution and transport depend on oil; schools and public offices have had to close. JOSE ATILES (ENG) traces the history of US interventions in Cuba and conceptualises US sanctions and tariffs as instruments of economic warfare – and as unlawful forms of state violence under international law.

International law, however, has never been of much interest to Trump. Only on Tuesday, he threatened Iran before the expiry of his ultimatum: “a whole civilisation will die”. All the more reason, argues CHRISTOPHER JANZ (ENG), to defend international law instead of discarding it as an inconvenient obstacle to supposedly “just wars”.

Such abandonment happens, in the words of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, “gradually, and then suddenly.” DORUK ERHAN (ENG) uses this line to describe the slow erosion of the rule of law in Turkey, one year after the detention of Istanbul’s elected mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and the beginning of his trial – and the surprisingly limited political effect of this form of autocratic lawfare.

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India’s democracy – the largest in the world – is also increasingly eating itself from within. Under Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party governments, now in their third consecutive term, the formal architecture of democracy remains intact: elections are held, courts sit, and newspapers continue to be published. ANMOL JAIN (ENG) explains what is happening behind this democratic façade and how to make sense of those complex processes of democratic erosion.

India recently made headlines for a judicial decision as well: the Supreme Court allowed the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment in the case Harish Rana v. Union of India, recognising a right to die with dignity. Yet RAGHAV SENGUPTA(ENG) warns that without adequate safeguards, the ruling risks undermining patient autonomy and introducing ableist assumptions.

Questions of bodily autonomy and ethical boundaries have also reached the Olympic movement. Under the International Olympic Committee’s new policy on the protection of the women’s category, all women and girls will have to undergo genetic testing. MICHELE KRECH and ANTOINE DUVAL (ENG) explain why the policy is scientifically, procedurally and legally problematic.

The German reform of military conscription has also been controversial both ethically and legally. Men aged 18 and over will now be required to undergo compulsory assessment. For MARIUS BURMANN (GER), the new model of conscription – with its inherent uncertainty – is almost paradigmatic of Walter Benjamin’s concept of law-preserving and threatening violence.

Violence also threatens foreign regime critics who seek protection in Germany – through digital surveillance, threats against family members back home, or even physical attacks and murder. The new § 87a of the German Criminal Code aims to combat this so-called “transnational repression”. Yet the offence falls short, misreads the actual structures, and ultimately remains largely symbolic criminal law, concludes FABIAN KRAUSE (GER).

More protection, more security – promises that also accompany new security law. A planned system of biometric internet surveillance would grant the police new powers. JOHANNA HAHN (GER) explains that the draft leaves key questions unanswered: the data basis, technical functioning and oversight mechanisms remain unclear – raising significant fundamental rights concerns.

Even more power for the executive: the federal government will in future be able to designate safe countries of origin by statutory instrument. The Green parliamentary group now wants the Federal Constitutional Court to review this reform. According to HODA BOURENANE (GER), the chances of success are good, as the reform bypasses the procedure required under Article 16a of the Basic Law.

Alongside growing executive power, executive disobedience has also become an increasing problem in Germany. The Federal Minister of Justice now wants to curb it and strengthen the authority of the courts. PHILIPP KOEPSELL (GER) shows where the proposal falls short.

In order to prevent judicial disobedience, the Saxon parliament recently decided that even non-criminal enemies of the constitution may be excluded from legal traineeships. JONATHAN SCHRAMM and FELIX THRUN (GER) consider the reform justified – though a uniform federal rule would be even better.

Constitutional violations also appear in the “government programme” of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt. Most of its migration-policy proposals would be legally impermissible, argue MARK CUNO and LUKAS BORNSCHEIN (GER).

Legally problematic lawmaking can also be found in Georgia. The country’s new “foreign agent” law criminalises political expression linked to foreign support and extends liability even to individuals. For MARIAM BEGADZE and ANA PAPUASHVILI (ENG), the law exposes a deeper structural problem that goes beyond obvious violations of freedom of expression and association: the lack of a substantive theory of the limits of criminalisation, even within the framework of the ECHR.

In Croatia, the national government overrode the city of Zagreb in order to host the handball team’s homecoming together with a controversial nationalist singer. MATIJA MILOŠ (ENG) warns that this move undermines local autonomy and risks normalising fascist symbols in public life.

Church autonomy, by contrast, was at issue before the CJEU. The Court held that a Catholic association cannot dismiss an employee for leaving the Church while employing non-Catholics in the same position. SARAH GEIGER and JOHANNA KRAMER (ENG) see the ruling as another step towards convergence between European and national case law.

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Meanwhile, Germany is debating the future of statutory health insurance. The Health Finance Commission has recommended abolishing free co-insurance for spouses and equivalent partners without children under the age of six. SOPHIA STELZHAMMER (GER) argues that what requires explanation is not the abolition itself but its link to marriage. Instead, free family insurance should consistently be tied to the assumption of care responsibilities in order to relieve all families fairly and avoid structural dependency of women.

Speaking of structural dependency: on 31 March 2026, the University of Cyprus held a conference on the British military bases on Cyprus. All speakers were men. NATALIE ALKIVIADOU (ENG) asks whether there really is no female scholarat the University of Cyprus who could speak on the topic.

Spain offers a more hopeful example. There, combating violence against women has become a matter of state policy. From specialised courts to synchronised GPS monitoring of perpetrators and victims, the “Spanish model” demonstrates how consistent victim protection can halve femicide rates compared to Germany. MANUELA NIEHAUS (GER) delineates what would have to change in Germany so that protection no longer depends on chance.

There is also good news from the United States: for the first time, two US courts have found Meta and Google (YouTube) liable for harm caused to users by the design of their platforms. NORA HERTZ (ENG) explains why this could mark the beginning of a new era of human rights litigation in Europe.

Andrea Pető’s editorial also offers a note of hope. Elections are special moments, of course. But the “genuinely new ways of thinking and acting” she calls for in Hungary emerge every day – whether in lunar orbit or here on our home planet, under the sun.

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That’s it for this week. Take care and all the best!

Yours,

the Verfassungsblog Team

If you would like to receive the weekly editorial as an e-mail, you can subscribe here.

The post After Collapse appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Vor zehn Jahren begann Ungarns illiberale Regierung ihre Kampagne gegen die Central European University (CEU). „Andrea, was wird jetzt aus dir?“, wurde ich damals auf einer Konferenz in Budapest gefragt. Der Kollege meinte nicht mich, sondern die CEU. Er war ein gut bezahlter, überzeugter Fidesz-Apparatschik. Später, als sich Fidesz noch weiter nach rechts bewegte, wurde er zu einem sogenannten „Fidesz-Waisen“. Heute, im Jahr 2026, ist er Berater der Respect and Freedom Party (TISZA); ein typisches Beispiel für pragmatischen Karrierismus.

„Wir verlassen Budapest. Wir werden gut in Wien leben, der lebenswertesten Stadt der Welt. Und wenn hier alles zusammenbricht, kommen wir zurück und bauen wieder auf, was sich wieder aufbauen lässt“, antwortete ich. Schon damals war mir klar, dass das “System der Nationalen Zusammenarbeit”, wie der von Fidesz aufgebaute illiberale Staat genannt wird, irgendwann zusammenbrechen würde. Kein Land lässt sich auf Dauer ohne fachliche Expertise regieren.

Nun ist es so weit: Die ungarischen Wahlen stehen unmittelbar bevor. Péter Magyar, der Oppositionsführer, liegt in den Umfragen deutlich vorn. Meine Prognose aus dem Jahr 2017 beginnt sich zu bewahrheiten.

Was den Kollaps betrifft, hatte ich recht: Andere öffentliche Institutionen sind tatsächlich zusammengebrochen, auch jene der Hochschulbildung und Forschung. Doch eine entscheidende Frage bleibt offen: Wie soll dieses System wieder aufgebaut werden? Mit Blick auf Magyars Programm sind Zweifel durchaus angebracht. Sein erklärtes Ziel ist bislang, die Autonomie der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Universitäten schlicht wiederherzustellen. Mit anderen Worten: Er möchte den Status quo der Zeit vor der Fidesz-Ära reaktivieren. Doch ist das überhaupt möglich? Und vor allem: Ist es notwendig, zu dem zurückzukehren, was in den letzten 16 Jahren zerstört wurde?

Sollte TISZA tatsächlich eine verfassungsändernde Zweidrittelmehrheit erreichen, stünden die ungarische Wissenschaft und der Hochschulsektor vor der historischen Chance, ein neues System für das 21. Jahrhundert zu bauen, anstatt das alte nur zu restaurieren. Dieses Umdenken ist wichtig. Es ergibt wenig Sinn, zu Strukturen zurückzukehren, die sich als so anfällig für illiberale Angriffe erwiesen haben – das gilt besonders für die Personen, die diese Institutionen leiteten. Illiberale Politiker und ihre Wählerschaften werden nach der Wahl nicht einfach verschwinden. Gleiches gilt für die wirtschaftlichen und geopolitischen Interessen. Ebenso wenig wird der illiberale Drang verschwinden, Hochschulbildung, Ressourcen und Wissensproduktion sowie deren Genehmigung und Verbreitung zu kontrollieren. Umso mehr kommt es darauf an, dass Wissenschaft und Hochschulen diesmal besser darauf vorbereitet sind.

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Editor’s Pick

von MAXIMILIAN STEINBEIS

Neulich habe ich auf der Suche nach Gelegenheiten, arabische Filme mit Untertiteln zu sehen, die entlegeneren Winkel von Netflix durchstöbert und bin dabei auf eine Serie gestoßen, die zum Bizarrsten und Lustigsten gehört, das ich in letzter Zeit gesehen habe (zumal auf dieser doch ziemlich trostlosen Plattform): Masameer stammt aus Saudi-Arabien, lief ursprünglich auf YouTube und war dort ungeheuer populär. Es ist nicht schwer zu sehen, warum: Da wird unter der bleiernen Decke des Autoritarismus eine Gesellschaft sichtbar, eine ungerechte, undisziplinierte, uneingeschüchterte Gesellschaft, die sich reflektieren und über sich selbst genauso lustig machen wie aufregen kann – über die vernagelte Ignoranz ihrer Milliardärssöhnchen, über die unerschütterliche Unfähigkeit ihrer Bürokraten, über den brutalen Zynismus ihrer Kriminellen, über den verzweifelten Lebensmut der Habenichtse an ihren Rändern. Sie ist schon ein paar Jahre alt, diese Serie, das Produkt eines glücklicheren Jahrzehnts. Ihr Produzent Abdulaziz al-Muzaini wurde 2024 offenbar zu 13 Jahren Gefängnis verurteilt.

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Die Woche auf dem Verfassungsblog

zusammengefasst von EVA MARIA BREDLER

Über Ostern hat unser Newsletter eine Woche lang Pause gemacht. Ob Sie in dieser Zeit den Mond umrundet oder einfach nur in der Sonne gelegen und versucht haben, einen möglichen dritten Weltkrieg zu ignorieren – es ist einiges passiert. Los geht’s.

Am Sonntag wählt Ungarn ein neues Parlament. Momentan stehen alle Zeichen gegen Orbán: Fidesz’ wichtigste Herausforderin, die Mitte-rechts-Partei Tisza, könnte – nach 16 Jahren Orbán – sogar eine Zweidrittelmehrheit erreichen. Damit könnte die kommende Regierung das Land zwar demokratisch aufpeppeln, unterliege dabei aber kaum institutioneller Kontrolle, meint  ZOLTÁN ÁDÁM (EN) – und warnt davor, Populismus mit Populismus zu bekämpfen.

Institutionelle Kontrolle für Ungarn kommt häufig auch aus Luxemburg. Nun hat der EuGH entschieden, dass die Nichtverlängerung der Sendelizenz des regierungskritischen Radiosenders Klubrádió mit Medienfreiheit und Pluralismus unvereinbar ist. MELINDA RUCZ (EN) zeigt, wie der EuGH mit dem Urteil leise seine Rechtsprechung zur Medienfreiheit verschiebt.

Außerdem hat der EuGH in einer historischen Entscheidung erstmals einen neuen „gesetzgeberischen Rahmen“ gefordert, um das Problem unrechtmäßig ernannter Richter*innen im polnischen Justizsystem zu lösen. Dazu brauchte es mehr als 50 (!) Vorlagen. Bis Polen ein solches Gesetz verabschiedet, dürfen diese Richter an ordentlichen Gerichten nur im Einzelfall abgelehnt werden. LAURENT PECH (EN) erklärt diese schwierige Kompromisslösung.

Ebenfalls historisch: Die UN-Generalversammlung hat den Handel mit versklavten Afrikaner*innen und deren Versklavung zum schwersten Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit erklärt. Für LUIS ESLAVA (EN) ist diese Erklärung nicht nur symbolisch: Sie stellt die bisherigen völkerrechtlichen Vorstellungen von Zeit, Verantwortung und Wiedergutmachung infrage. Danach sei Sklaverei nicht vergangen, sondern präge unsere Gegenwart.

Um solche Kontinuitäten zu erkennen, muss man nicht lange suchen. Da wäre etwa Trumps Executive Order 14160, die Kindern die US-Staatsbürgerschaft verwehren soll, wenn deren Mütter keine Staatsbürgerinnen sind und sich entweder ohne Aufenthaltstitel oder nur vorübergehend legal im Land aufhalten, und wenn auch der Vater keine dauerhafte Aufenthaltsgenehmigung besitzt. Nach der mündlichen Verhandlung am Mittwoch sieht es zwar so aus, als würde der Supreme Court Trump diesmal nicht decken. Doch ANJA BOSSOW (EN) erklärt, warum das ein Pyrrhussieg wäre.

Kontinuitäten von den schwersten Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit finden sich auch in der US-Außenpolitik. Seit Ende Januar blockieren die USA faktisch Ölimporte Kubas, indem sie Sanktionen und Zölle erheben – mit katastrophalen humanitären Konsequenzen: Nicht nur Krankenhäuser, sondern auch die Wasser- und Lebensmittelversorgung und Transport hängen vom Öl ab, Schulen und Behörden schließen. JOSE ATILES (EN) zeichnet die Geschichte der US-Interventionen in Kuba nach und konzipiert die US-amerikanischen Sanktionen und Zölle als Instrumente wirtschaftlicher Kriegsführung – und als völkerrechtswidrige Formen staatlicher Gewalt.

Doch das Völkerrecht interessiert Trump bekanntlich herzlich wenig. Erst am Dienstag drohte er dem Iran vor Ablauf seines Ultimatums: „a whole civilisation will die“. Umso mehr sollten wir uns für das Völkerrecht interessieren, statt es als lästiges Hindernis für „gerechte Kriege“ preiszugeben, so CHRISTOPHER JANZ (EN).

Diese Preisgabe funktioniert, in den Worten von Hemingways The Sun Also Rises „gradually, and then suddenly.“ DORUK ERHAN (EN) erzählt anhand dieses Zitats vom schleichenden Zerfall des türkischen Rechtsstaats, ein Jahr nach der Inhaftierung des gewählten Istanbuler Bürgermeisters Ekrem İmamoğlu und dem Beginn seines Prozesses – und von der überraschenden Wirkungslosigkeit dieser „autocratic lawfare“.

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Auch die indische Demokratie – die größte der Welt – zehrt sich derzeit von innen auf. Unter der Regierung der Bharatiya Janata Party von Narendra Modi besteht die Demokratie zwar formal fort: Wahlen finden statt, Gerichte arbeiten, und Zeitungen erscheinen. Doch dass sich hinter den Fassaden anderes abspielt und wie sich die komplexen Prozesse demokratischer Erosion verstehen lassen, zeigt ANMOL JAIN (EN).

Indien machte zuletzt auch wegen einer Gerichtsentscheidung Schlagzeilen: Der Oberste Gerichtshof erlaubte im Fall Harish Rana den Abbruch lebenserhaltender Maßnahmen, um das Recht auf würdevolles Sterben zu schützen. Doch RAGHAV SENGUPTA (EN) warnt: Ohne ausreichende Schutzmechanismen besteht die Gefahr, dass die Patient*innenautonomie untergraben wird und ableistische Annahmen in die Entscheidung einfließen.

Zu körperlicher Selbstbestimmung und ethischen Grenzfragen hat sich auch das Internationale Olympische Komitee nun positioniert. Wegen seiner neuen IOC-Richtlinie zum Schutz der Frauenkategorie im olympischen Sport müssen sich künftig alle Frauen und Mädchen genetisch testen lassen. MICHELE KRECH und ANTOINE DUVAL (EN) zeigen, warum die Policy wissenschaftlich, prozedural und rechtlich zweifelhaft ist.

Ethisch wie rechtlich umstritten war auch die Wehrpflichtreform. Nun werden Männer ab 18 verpflichtend gemustert. Für MARIUS BURMANN (DE) ist die neue Wehrpflicht mit ihrer inhärenten Unsicherheit geradezu paradigmatisch für Walter Benjamins Konzept der rechtserhaltenden und drohenden Gewalt.

Gewalt droht ausländischen Regimekritiker*innen, die in Deutschland Schutz suchen, auch hier: von digitaler Spionage über Drohungen gegen die Familie im Heimatland bis hin zu körperlicher Gewalt und Mord. Der neue § 87a StGB soll diese sogenannte „transnationale Repression“ nun bekämpfen. Doch der Tatbestand greift zu kurz, verfehlt die tatsächlichen Strukturen und bleibt vor allem symbolisches Strafrecht, so das Fazit von FABIAN KRAUSE (DE).

Mehr Schutz, mehr Sicherheit – das verspricht nicht nur das Strafrecht, sondern auch das Sicherheitsrecht. Nun soll die geplante Einführung biometrischer Internetfahndung der Polizei neue Befugnisse verschaffen. JOHANNA HAHN (DE) erklärt: Der Entwurf lässt zentrale Fragen offen. Datenbasis, Funktionsweise und Kontrolle bleiben unklar – mit erheblichen Grundrechtsrisiken.

Noch mehr Macht für die Exekutive: Die Bundesregierung kann künftig per Rechtsverordnung sichere Herkunftsstaatenfestlegen. Die Grünen-Fraktion will dies nun vom BVerfG überprüfen lassen. Die Erfolgsaussichten seien gut, so HODA BOURENANE (DE); die Reform ignoriere das Verfahren des Art. 16a GG.

Neben zunehmender exekutiver Macht wird auch exekutiver Ungehorsam in Deutschland zunehmend zum Problem. Nun will die Bundesjustizministerin ihn eindämmen und die Autorität der Gerichte stärken. Wo ihr Vorschlag zu kurz greift, zeigt PHILIPP KOEPSELL (DE).

Um judiziellen Ungehorsam dagegen zu verhindern, beschloss der Sächsische Landtag vor Kurzem, dass auch straflose Verfassungsfeinde vom Referendariat ausgeschlossen werden können. JONATHAN SCHRAMM und FELIX THRUN (DE) halten die Reform für richtig; noch besser wäre aber eine bundeseinheitliche Regelung.

Gegen die Verfassung verstößt auch das „Regierungsprogramm“ der AfD in Sachsen-Anhalt: Die meisten ihrer migrationspolitischen Forderungen seien rechtlich unzulässig, so MARK CUNO und LUKAS BORNSCHEIN (DE).

Unzulässige Rechtssetzung kommt auch aus Georgien. Das neue „Auslandsagentengesetz“ stellt politische Äußerungen unter Strafe, wenn sie mit ausländischer finanzieller Unterstützung verbunden sind – und weitet die Haftung sogar auf Einzelpersonen aus. Für MARIAM BEGADZE und ANA PAPUASHVILI (EN) macht das Gesetz ein tiefer liegendes Problem sichtbar, das über die offensichtlichen Eingriffe in Meinungs- und Vereinigungsfreiheit hinausgeht: Es fehle an einer strafrechtlichen Theorie zulässiger Kriminalisierung, auch innerhalb der EMRK.

In Kroatien setzte sich die Regierung über die Stadt Zagreb hinweg, um die Heimkehr der Handballnationalmannschaft gemeinsam mit einem umstrittenen nationalistischen Sänger zu feiern. MATIJA MILOŠ (EN) warnt, dass dieser Schritt die kommunale Selbstverwaltung untergräbt und faschistische Symbole im öffentlichen Raum normalisieren könnte.

Um kirchliche Selbstverwaltung ging es dagegen vor dem EuGH. Dieser entschied, dass ein katholischer Verband einer Mitarbeiterin nicht kündigen darf, weil sie aus der Kirche ausgetreten ist, während zugleich Nicht-Katholik*innen in derselben Position beschäftigt werden. SARAH GEIGER und JOHANNA KRAMER (EN) sehen darin einen weiteren Schritt hin zu einer stärkeren Annäherung von europäischer und nationaler Rechtsprechung.

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Währenddessen diskutiert Deutschland über die gesetzliche Krankenversicherung. Die FinanzKommission Gesundheit hat nun empfohlen, „die beitragsfreie Krankenversicherung für Ehegatten und ihnen gleichgestellte Lebenspartner ohne Kinder unter sechs Jahren abzuschaffen.“ SOPHIA STELZHAMMER (DE) hält nicht die Abschaffung an sich für erklärungsbedürftig, sondern ihre Bindung an die Ehe. Stattdessen sollte sich die beitragsfreie Familienversicherung konsequent an der Übernahme von Sorgeverantwortung orientieren, um alle Familien gerecht zu entlasten und eine strukturelle Abhängigkeit von Frauen zu vermeiden.

Apropos strukturelle Abhängigkeit: Am 31. März 2026 veranstaltete die Universität Zypern eine Konferenz zu den britischen Militärbasen auf Zypern. Alle Redner waren Männer. NATALIE ALKIVIADOU (EN) fragt sich: Gibt es an der Universität Zypern wirklich keine Wissenschaftlerin, die zu diesem Thema sprechen könnte?

Hoffnung macht Spanien: Dort gehört der Kampf gegen Gewalt gegen Frauen nun zur Staatsräson. Von spezialisierten Gerichten bis zur synchronisierten GPS-Überwachung von Tätern und Opfern zeigt das “spanische Modell”, wie ein konsequenter Opferschutz die Femizidrate im Vergleich zu Deutschland halbieren kann. MANUELA NIEHAUS (DE) beschreibt, was sich hierzulande ändern muss, damit Schutz kein Zufallsprodukt mehr ist.

Und auch aus den USA gibt es gute Nachrichten: Erstmals haben zwei US-Gerichte Meta und Google (YouTube) für Schäden haftbar gemacht, die Nutzer*innen durch das Design ihrer Plattformen erlitten haben. NORA HERTZ (EN) erklärt, warum das eine neue Ära der Menschenrechtsklagen in Europa markieren könnte.

Auch Andrea Petős Editorial macht Hoffnung. Wahlen sind natürlich besondere Momente. Doch die „genuinely new ways of thinking and acting“, wie Peto sie für Ungarn fordert, entstehen jeden Tag – ob im Mondorbit oder auf unserem Heimatplaneten, unter der Sonne.

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Das war’s für diese Woche.

Ihnen alles Gute!

Ihr

Verfassungsblog-Team

Wenn Sie das wöchentliche Editorial als E-Mail zugesandt bekommen wollen, können Sie es hier bestellen.

The post Nach dem Kollaps appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Jurisdiction as Allegiance and Domicile

The 14^th Amendment states that all persons born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are to be citizens of the United States. Until recently, there was consensus that this language conferred citizenship to almost any child born within the country’s territory, with a small set of exceptions: the children of ambassadors, soldiers of invading armies or born on foreign ships in U.S. waters, and Native Americans who maintain tribal relations. The government contends this consensus rests on a grave misunderstanding. “Jurisdiction,” it argued, does not mean merely “being subject to the laws and authority of the United States.” It really means “political” jurisdiction, and individuals must owe primary as well as direct and immediate, not merely temporary or partial, “allegiance” to the United States to be subject thereto [p.11].

Importantly, only domiciled individuals can possess such allegiance. Domicile, Solicitor General Sauer told the Court, is a “high-level concept [p.24].” It reflects not merely the fact of territorial residence, nor the individual’s intent to become a member of the political community. These are, to be sure, sometimes dispositive, the SG admitted [Id. p.24]. But they are irrelevant when the individual resides in violation of immigration law, or even if their residence is lawful but merely temporary in the eyes of the government. Such individuals lack the legal capacity to establish domicile. Because in the eyes of the government this deficiency in legal capacity is hereditary, the children of such adults cannot be U.S. citizens at birth, because per the 14^th Amendment only individuals born ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ acquire citizenship at birth.

Two Strategies for Constitutional Erosion

The government’s attempt to poke a hole into the 14^th Amendment’s near categorical rule rested on two distinct strategies that have been successful in convincing the Court to reshape the Constitution’s framework in other contexts.

The first is that of originalist reinterpretation: the government’s argument that jurisdiction really meant ‘political’ jurisdiction and that ‘political’ jurisdiction depended on ‘allegiance’ invoked the mantle of original public meaning originalism; a method of constitutional interpretation that suggests we should construe a text’s meaning based on how a competent reader would have understood the language at the time it was adopted. Accordingly, the government argued that its theory of the 14^th Amendment’s jurisdictional requirement was consistent with the meaning of the term jurisdiction as it was understood at the time the Amendment was drafted. Originalism has moved from a fringe method of constitutional interpretation to one of the Court’s preferred ones in a little less than 50 years. Its methodological emphasis on history (and tradition) to determine the Constitution’s meaning was key, inter alia, to the Court’s decision to roll back reproductive rights, expand the scope of the Second Amendment, and declare nation-wide injunctions unlawful for being beyond the scope of federal judicial authority.

The second was a method familiar to scholars of immigration law: the detachment of constitutional protection from the individual’s de facto subjection to the laws and authority of the U.S, and its attachment instead to a legally constructed status or concept whose scope and applicability it is for the government to determine. The government’s attempt to create an allegiance and domicile-based exception to the 14^th Amendment’s rule rested on this move. It sought to turn the territorial fact of jurisdiction into a question of legal capacity—a capacity that was based on the individual’s immigration status, which is, of course, for the government to determine. This method—the substitution of territorial fact with a legal fiction—to determine the Constitution’s applicability has been key to the erosion of constitutional protections in the context of immigration enforcement agenda: it has underpinned, e.g., its decision to deny due process and habeas review to non-citizens in removal proceedings who were arrested on U.S. soil, and to permit racial profiling in immigration enforcement efforts, even if this occurs on the streets of Los Angeles, affecting non-citizens and citizens alike, rather than at the cartographic border.

Law in the Service of Political Ideology

Both strategies are likely to fail in Trump v. Barbara. The Court was not persuaded by the originalist argument [e.g. 25-6]. The historical evidence the government relied on to support its revisionist jurisdiction-as-allegiance theory was, at best, ambiguous, and at worst a highly selective deployment of sources whose exclusionary and racist vision of citizenship the 14th Amendment was designed precisely to repudiate. Nor was it persuaded by the domicile-based exception to the 14^th Amendment’s general rule. The government heavily relied on the Court’s own 1898 decision in Wong Kim Ark, a case whose controlling rule of decision was precisely to affirm the categorical nature of America’s ius soli rule, irrespective of the parents’ immigration status (and allegiance.) Wong’s parents, while resident and domiciled in the United States, were subjects of the Emperor of China. Nor was the domicile concept, which collapsed under examination into little more than “whatever immigration status the government deems sufficient for the 14^th Amendment to apply,” easily retrofitted with the extra-territoriality principle that underpinned the rule’s other recognized exceptions [81].

The oral argument laid bare what everyone already knew: there simply is no coherent legal argument that supports the government’s reinterpretation of the 14^th Amendment’s citizenship clause. For the Court to deem the Executive Order constitutional it would have to simultaneously embrace an invented conceptual distinction, rely on an internally incoherent mishmash of methods of constitutional interpretation to rewrite the meaning of clear constitutional text, override more than a century of its own settled precedent, and potentially cause administrative havoc — all in the name of a theory whose origin and content its own lawyer could not explain coherently. Constitutional law may be a way of doing politics. But it is not just politics. It has its own tools, methods, and discipline—and these yield real constraints. They may be nowhere near as clear or hard as many would like them to be. But they nonetheless exist. Wednesday’s argument showed what happens when a political actor wants to weaponize the law to turn their ideological views into national policy but treats the law’s own discipline as utterly irrelevant.

The government’s choice to litigate this case despite the violence to constitutional text, history, and legal discipline it required is telling. It reflects the fact that the Court has done its own fair share to blur the line between law and politics. If the administration loses, it shows that this line is still there. On its face, this is a win for the rule of law and the Constitution’s commitment to equal citizenship. But it would be a mistake to take this as evidence that the constitutional system remains in good health. If the Court rules as it is expected to, this won’t be because of a principled commitment to the constitutional text and values at stake. It is more likely evidence of the case’s strategic value to the Court’s own legitimacy.

Birthright Citizenship is Different

Birthright citizenship is different to many of the administration’s other political agenda items that have made it to the Court: it is neither key to religious culture wars, as reproductive rights were, nor is it central to the Court’s own political project of constructing a strong, and legally unaccountable, system of executive-led political rule. To be sure, a substantive win on birthright would further aggrandize the Presidency, granting it the power to rewrite the Constitution with the stroke of a pen. But it does not have the same structural significance to the Court’s project of rebalancing the separation of powers in not just the President’s favor but also its own. Trump v. Barbara’s value lies instead in the opportunity it provides to bolster the Court’s standing and legitimacy, because of its high expressive value and signaling function.

The 14^th Amendment’s citizenship attribution rule is not merely part of but structurally foundational and constitutive of the bright side of American exceptionalism. The SG told the Court that the U.S. is exceptional in its approach to birthright citizenship. This is factually false: ius soli, including as a categorical rule, is common throughout South America. Several countries within Europe—a continent the SG invoked as a general comparator, despite the diversity of its countries and their respective citizenship regimes [pp. 38-9]— also possess strong ius soli traditions, though these have also come under political pressure in response to—surprise, surprise—right-wing fears about increased immigration and the polity’s purity.

But the SG was right to say that the American ius soli rule is exceptional in some way. Citizenship laws are uniquely potent and highly expressive tools at the disposal of governments to determine the character and identity of the polity they are tasked with governing. They set the outer limit for how much the law may be put in service of exclusionary political ideology. America’s ius soli rule is exceptional in taking this tool largely out of the hands of the democratic majority of the day, by attaching citizenship solely and immediately to the fact of territorial birth. Importantly, it did so at a time when the country’s legal elite itself was deeply divided over what structural purpose its citizenship laws should serve: should they reflect the nativist and racial ideology of white supremacy that licensed the system of slavery? Or should they repudiate America’s original sin and instead embrace the egalitarianism of its liberal republican ideological commitments? The 14^th Amendment chose the latter, thereby turning the country’s citizenship attribution rule into a silent yet uniquely potent engine of America’s (flawed) attempt at multi-racial liberal democracy. This egalitarian ethos made America’s citizenship regime exceptional at the time it was designed (and arguably still today), at least vis-à-vis those that emerged from Europe’s former empires, constitutional monarchies, fascist dictatorships, and religiously defined nation-states.

By handing the challengers a win, the Court can position itself as the defender of not just the rule of law, but of this ideological commitment to equal citizenship as well. It can do so all while it is actively eroding both. It has been entrenching the unequal citizenship of minorities by rolling back hard-won legal protections of their rights and dignity, whether it be by abolishing reproductive rights, eroding statutory protection of equal political representation for African-Americans, permitting discrimination against individuals on the basis of their sexual identity, or rendering it more difficult for states to ensure that trans youth receive adequate and life-saving therapeutic care. And it has consistently chipped away at the rule of law’s commitment to comprehensively subject the exercise of public power to legal process and values, inter alia, by systematically shrinking the applicability of procedural guarantees as the government proclaims to be enforcing immigration law, and by restricting the lower courts’ power to issue nationwide injunctions against precisely the kind of unlawful executive action that was at issue in Trump v. Barbara.

Constitutional Rot Laid Bare

Worse still, dealing a loss to the government also obscures the Court’s own complicity in legitimizing the assault on the Constitution’s egalitarian spirit. A less politicized Court would and should have laughed the government out of the room when it appealed the case. After all, the Court decide for itself which cases it hears. If it had ignored the government’s request, the lower federal courts would have simply continued to block the executive order from going into effect. But the Court didn’t do that. It chose to hear the case. In doing so, it lent not just legitimacy to the President’s efforts to rewrite the Constitution, and contributed to the shifting Overton window on the appropriateness of the citizenship clause’s categorical rule. It also rewarded the cluster of legal academics who were willing to sacrifice methodological discipline and the fiction of scholarly neutrality to produce op-eds and law review articles to legitimate the government’s argument. They were all quoted in the government’s briefs. Their arguments claimed the mantle of original public meaning originalism. But as rebuttals showed: neither methodology nor history was on their side. Nonetheless, they doubled down.

In the face of such a politicized Court and legal academy, some argue that the lesson we should draw from Trump v. Barbara is to abandon the strategy of litigation as a method of resistance altogether. There is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost. Liberals, by seeking to beat the administration on its own methodological terms, are both legitimizing its methods and the legal actors that design and utilize them to turn anti-constitutional politics into constitutional fact. The critique is legitimate and the problem it identifies is real. But the conclusion it draws is overly broad as well as empirically inaccurate. It ignores that liberal legalism has proven to be a successful strategy of resistance in other countries experiencing democratic backsliding. And if the Court rules as it is expected to, much will, in fact, be gained: every child born to immigrant parents will continue to have U.S. citizenship at birth, and the many privileges, entitlements, and protections against state power this confers. If we have learned anything from the past year, it is how important possession of this status is under the current administration. Trump v. Barbara shows that liberal legalism may be a double-edged sword. But in a system that continues to hash out its political disagreements through the law, it remains a sword nonetheless. To abandon it would be ceding too much power—better to wield it clear-eyed about its risks and in combination with other strategies of resistance.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Trump v Barbara will likely go down in public consciousness as a tale of successful constitutional resistance in the face of a devious executive-led assault on a core value and achievement of U.S. constitutionalism. This obscures that it should be seen instead as a case study for the mechanics of constitutional erosion. It is yet further evidence that the project of liberal constitutionalism does not end with a declaration of emergency or military coup. Instead, it dies by a “thousand cuts” to its core commitments and values. These are no longer merely inflicted by political actors and branches. Instead, they are inflicted by legal actors who, by virtue of their particular role obligations within a constitutional system, possess a special duty to defend these very commitments.

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UN General Assembly Hall following the vote on Resolution A/80/L. 25, March 2026 (New York, US). Unique Identifier. UN71134166. UN Photo/Manuel Elías. Courtesy UN Photo Library.

The final vote on the Declaration was striking: 123 in favour, 3 against (Argentina, Israel and the United States), and 52 abstentions, including Australia, the United Kingdom, and most European Union member states. This distribution revealed some of the deep fault lines running through the international legal order – a split between competing understandings of what international law is and what it can and should do. Against this background, the Declaration can be read as operating within the language of foundational instruments of international law while simultaneously pushing their limits through a set of decisive doctrinal moves. Seen in this light, the Declaration offers at least three lessons for international law today.

Rethinking time

The first and perhaps most immediate intervention lies in how the Declaration reconfigures time in international law.

The Declaration frames slavery not simply as a historical wrong, but as a crime whose consequences endure. It describes racialised chattel enslavement as the gravest crime against humanity by reason of its “enduring global consequences”. In doing so, it unsettles a central assumption that continues to structure legal reasoning, namely that the past can be neatly separated from the present.

Slavery, in this framing, is not over. It is constitutive of the present. This is a juridical claim. The Declaration reminds us that slavery was not simply an economic or political system, but a legal project. The Declaration refers to the “progressive codification of the racialized chattel enslavement of Africans across the world”. This language is important. It foregrounds the role of law as one of enslavement’s primary conditions of possibility.

Through legal instruments, doctrines, and administrative practices, human beings were rendered inheritable, alienable, and perpetual property. Reproduction itself was juridically reorganised as a mechanism of accumulation. Race was codified as a principle of differentiation structuring labour, mobility, and entitlement. In this sense, slavery operated through a global legal infrastructure.

The Declaration makes this point with clarity. It describes enslavement as historically unprecedented in its legal and structural design, a “world-breaking and world-redefining” formation that transformed the fates of all peoples through new racialised regimes of labour and property, the effects of which continue to be widely experienced by Afrodescendant populations across the globe. From this perspective, the claim that slavery belongs to the past becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Not only because its material consequences persist, but because the legal scaffolding of slavery continues to organise the present.

Crucially, the Declaration also affirms – and reminds audiences still oblivious to the battles by grassroots organisations against the ongoing effects of slavery, from Black Lives Matter to the work of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), which supported the Declaration – that Africans and people of African descent have “continuously resisted, contested and litigated” the crimes of slavery and the slave trade from their inception. This matters because it further destabilises the narrative of closure. If both domination and resistance persist, then the legal and political questions raised by slavery remain open.

The Declaration reinforces this temporal reconfiguration through a principle drawn from African moral and legal traditions, that “a crime does not rot”, which is explicitly cited in the Declaration’s preamble. This formulation carries significant doctrinal implications. It affirms that grave crimes are not subject to statutory limitations and that they generate continuing obligations until addressed through truth, justice, and reparation.

What emerges here is a jurisprudence of the present structured by enduring past wrongdoing. Paraphrasing Pierre Bourdieu, “the present is [then] not the temporal present, it is what is still sufficiently alive to be the object of struggles.”¹⁾ African, Caribbean, and other supporting states endorsing the Declaration thus outline a new jurisprudence of enduring past structural wrongdoing as “present”.

From acknowledgment to obligation

The second lesson concerns the long-standing tension between acknowledgment and obligation in international law.

The Declaration situates itself within a longer lineage of anticolonial legal interventions, including the Decolonisation Declaration of 1960 and the New International Economic Order of 1974. Across these moments, a recurring demand has been articulated that historical injustice be translated into present-day legal and institutional responsibility.

This translation has always been contested. The reactions to the present Declaration make this clear.

The United States rejected the Declaration’s legal implications, insisting that it does not recognise a legal right to reparations and cautioning against the imposition of obligations for acts that were not unlawful under international law at the time they occurred. The European Union, while abstaining rather than opposing, raised concerns about legal and factual issues and warned against approaches that could imply retroactive responsibility or unsettle established legal categories.

These positions differ in tone, but they converge in structure. Both rely, in different ways, on a doctrine of non-retroactivity. Both seek to stabilise the temporal boundaries of international law by locating legality firmly within the normative frameworks of the past. And both work to prevent the translation of historical injustice into binding obligations in the present.

What both the US and Europe defend is not simply a technical rule about temporal jurisdiction but a broader architecture of the international legal order – one that insulates past distributions of wealth, power, and responsibility from contemporary claims.

This pattern is familiar. International law has long been willing to acknowledge injustice, even to condemn it in strong moral terms. But it has been far more hesitant when that acknowledgment threatens to generate enforceable consequences. The Declaration disrupts this settlement. It insists that acknowledgment without obligation is insufficient. By explicitly linking enslavement to jus cogens norms and to the law of state responsibility, it places pressure on the idea that the past can be legally closed. In the language of the Declaration: “grave crimes generate continuing obligations”.

A politics of refusal

The third lesson concerns the nature of international law itself. The Declaration’s voting pattern revealed the coexistence of distinct international legal projects.

On one side, there is an international law that stabilises the existing order. It manages the past, regulates its visibility, and limits the extent to which it can generate present-day obligations. It is a law oriented toward closure, one that absorbs critique while preserving underlying structures.

On the other side, there is an international law that is confirmed through this Declaration, one that does not seek closure, but interruption.

It is here that Vasuki Nesiah’s notion of a politics of refusal becomes particularly illuminating. For Nesiah, reparations claims are interventions into the very way the global order is perceived and organised. They function as counter-regimes of visibility, drawing attention to the structural relations that link historical dispossession to contemporary inequality. More importantly, reparations are also performative. They interrupt.

A politics of refusal thus challenges the terms on which inclusion is offered. It refuses the conversion of structural injustice into manageable claims. It resists the closure that often accompanies reparations when framed as technical or humanitarian remedies.

In this sense, reparations as refusal operates at multiple levels. It refuses the idea that injustice can be confined to the past. It refuses the idea that recognition without obligation and material redistribution is sufficient. And it refuses the adequacy of one reading of international law, as one already existing that limits the scale and persistence of structural inequality.

Keeping this in mind, this is precisely what the Declaration does. It forces a confrontation with a history that has long been here, but normalised and contained. It disrupts the background conditions that have allowed that history to persist without transformation. It is a reminder of slavery and its aftermath as what Kathryn Yussof identifies as the grammar of our present racialised planetary order.

In doing so, the Declaration repositions international law itself – not as a neutral framework, but as a terrain of contestation in which different normative projects continue to struggle over the meaning of justice, responsibility, and repair.

On the wreckage upon which we stand

Taken together, these three lessons demonstrate that the Declaration is a juridical intervention that reconfigures how international law understands time, responsibility, and itself.

It reminds us that slavery was not only an event, but a structure. That acknowledgment without obligation is a form of containment. And that international law is not a single, unified system, but a field of contestation in which competing projects – of course, with asymmetrical capital, military and cultural capital behind them – continue to unfold.

These lessons are only the beginning of the journey of a Declaration that arrives as a reminder of the wreckage upon which we stand. And as we stand here, the Declaration invites a broader question: not only about what international law has been, but also what it might still become.

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Yet in retrospect, regardless of which moments are singled out, the first few months of 2026 will stand apart, and March above all. It marks one full year since Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s elected mayor, was placed in pre-trial detention. On 9 March 2026, İmamoğlu’s trial formally began. He stands accused of founding and directing an organized network of bribery and tender manipulation spanning a decade. If convicted on all counts, he faces a sentence exceeding 2,430 years. The case’s significance reaches far beyond İmamoğlu’s freedom or reputation, or even the interests of Istanbul’s residents, who have elected him twice. The public grasped as much immediately, taking to the streets in the days following his detention despite the harsh crackdown. The outrage was unsurprising, for İmamoğlu is the Republican People’s Party’s presidential candidate and the opposition politician most widely seen as capable of defeating Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who, after more than two decades in power, appears intent on seeking re-election.

It is against this high-stakes backdrop that one must understand the proliferation of legal challenges against İmamoğlu. Alongside the corruption case, there is a dizzying array of proceedings, from criminal charges to civil defamation suits, each capable on its own of ending his political prospects. This terrain has been well covered on this blog. In a superb post, Cem Tecimer characterizes the campaign as “textbook lawfare” and examines the charges alongside their flimsy legal foundations. Ayşegül Kars Kaynar accepts the designation and shows how far the weaponization of the judiciary has gone in İmamoğlu’s case, and why it represents a qualitative departure from earlier, more restrained phases of autocratic legalism.

What interests me here is something different, namely, the surprising inefficacy of this autocratic lawfare, which is most visible in the political reception of the trial. As one measure of that inefficacy, consider that public opinion has not shifted in any meaningful way. Even after the indictment landed with all its outrageous allegations, and even as government-aligned media consistently framed the proceedings as “the heist of the century” and “the work of an octopus-like criminal network,” polls still show İmamoğlu leading Erdoğan by a noticeable margin in a one-on-one contest. Segments of the AKP’s own base reportedly find the corruption charges unconvincing, while short clips of İmamoğlu speaking, secretly recorded inside the courtroom, have gone viral. All this matters enormously, for the purpose of the case against İmamoğlu was not merely to confine him to a twelve-square-meter cell for a year. It was to mark him as irredeemably compromised, as someone who can no longer claim a legitimate place in political life. If that project is failing, we should ask why and attend not only to lawfare’s surface achievements but also to its fragilities, that is, to law’s failure to turn mere political allegation into settled fact. In the end, lawfare that cannot make a criminal of İmamoğlu in the public mind may yet, paradoxically, make him stronger. If so, perhaps, Turkey need not share Campbell’s fate.

Silivri as a liminal space

The trial is being held in Silivri, a district on Istanbul’s western edge roughly seventy kilometers from the city center. Silivri occupies a peculiar place in the Turkish political imagination. On social media, “it’s cold in Silivri” has become something of a watchword, usually appended to a post critical of the government as a half-joking reminder that prison may await the dissenter. The reputation is hard-earned. It was here that the major political trials of the late 2000s and early 2010s unfolded, in which hundreds of military officers, journalists, and academics were prosecuted on coup-plotting charges later found to rest on fabricated evidence.

Those associations seem fully warranted when one considers how this trial has been conducted. From the very first day, access restrictions for press and public alike have been a source of contention. The courtroom is a large hall attached to the prison complex; a small enclosure at the very back was designated for journalists and observers, a position reporters described as a “blind spot” from which it was impossible to hear or follow the proceedings clearly. On 12 March 2026, the chief judge ended a session early when journalists refused to comply with his order to remain in that enclosure. On 16 March 2026, all vehicles were stopped at the prison entrance, barring access to the complex entirely except for those holding press credentials.

These restrictions are difficult to reconcile with – and may well amount to a violation of – Article 141 of the Turkish Constitution, which provides that court hearings are open to the public and permits exceptions only where required by considerations of public morality, security, or the protection of minors. They also contradict Turkey’s obligations under Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, under which the Strasbourg Court has subjected restrictions on courtroom access to a strict necessity test, treating publicity as a key safeguard against the administration of justice in secret.

What lends these restrictions an added note of irony is that it was the regime’s highest echelons had initially floated the idea of broadcasting the proceedings. In July 2025, Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party and the AKP’s de facto coalition partner, publicly endorsed live broadcasting, arguing that the trial should be fully visible to the public. Erdoğan followed the next day, stating that “if Mr. Bahçeli said so, it is a very nice gesture and hopefully it will be beneficial.” When the CHP seized on the opening and introduced a bill to amend the relevant article of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which prohibits audio and video recordings in courtrooms, the regime’s parliamentary bloc voted it down without debate.

Set against what has since transpired, however, the stillborn broadcasting initiative recedes in significance. The more consequential development came on 11 February 2026, when Akın Gürlek, the chief public prosecutor of Istanbul, who had overseen and built the case against İmamoğlu, was appointed Minister of Justice by presidential decree. The appointment also made Gürlek, ipso iure, president of the Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK), the body responsible for the appointment, promotion, transfer, and discipline of all judges and prosecutors in Turkey, including those who will decide the very case in which Gürlek is so personally invested.

Even prior to his appointment, aspects of Gürlek’s conduct had raised questions of legality, which his promotion further accentuated. On the day the indictment was submitted for court review, he held a press conference outlining key evidence, then gave interviews to government-aligned outlets discussing the substance of the case. The indictment itself, moreover, echoes language used by Erdoğan, including the description of the alleged criminal network as an “octopus”. Such prejudicial characterization is difficult to square with the prosecutorial function as defined in the Code of Criminal Procedure, which presupposes a measure of detachment, requiring prosecutors to collect and assess both inculpatory and exculpatory evidence. So too, public disclosure concerning the substance of a pending investigation is hard to reconcile with Article 157 of the Code, which unequivocally subjects the investigative phase to a norm of confidentiality. Defense counsel will no doubt raise these defects in due course. But Silivri is a liminal space where smart lawyering has its limits.

On the limits of lawfare: past and present

What the lawfare against İmamoğlu means to accomplish when its partisan ambitions are this transparent? One approach is to look backward to earlier episodes of lawfare in Turkey, and ask what became of their perpetrators and victims. İmamoğlu does this deliberately, invoking the historical record before the judges deciding his fate as a reminder of how such campaigns are remembered.

One comparison he returns to repeatedly is the Yassıada trials that followed the coup of May 1960, in which the military regime tried Adnan Menderes and the leadership of the Democrat Party. Those trials sought to deliver a permanent moral verdict on Menderes’s decade in power, reaching even into the details of his private life to construct the image of a man utterly unfit for public trust. In the end, Menderes and two of his ministers were convicted and hanged. Yet their political afterlife diverged sharply from the military regime’s intentions. Menderes became a martyr for democracy, around whose memory center-right parties, and later Erdoğan himself, successfully mobilized for decades. More troublingly, that martyrdom helped seal off the Democrat Party’s own authoritarian record from meaningful scrutiny. Recent scholarship has perceptively complicated this inherited narrative, though such revisions have yet to gain wider purchase.

Nor does one need to return to the 1960s for an example of Turkish lawfare that spectacularly misfired. Erdoğan’s own political career offers a more immediate precedent, one that both İmamoğlu and commentators have astutely invoked. Tried before a State Security Court in the late 1990s, Erdoğan, then mayor of Istanbul, was convicted for reciting a poem at a public rally – a conviction that rendered him legally ineligible for public office. He served four months in prison, the stakes far lower than those İmamoğlu now faces. Even so, the country’s most widely read newspapers wrote him off on their front pages, declaring that he “could not even become a mukhtar”, the humblest of elected offices. Erdoğan, of course, became considerably more than that.

These are powerful precedents. Yet in using them, one must attend to the discontinuities between Silivri and Yassıada, between the lawfare of the present and that of the past, and never lose sight of how much worse the present is. Human rights advocates and defense lawyers who lived through those earlier periods, and were themselves victimized by them, readily acknowledge as much. In earlier phases of Turkish lawfare, including those of the 2010s under the AKP, there remained at least some pretense that the judicial domain possessed a degree of autonomy, that it stood, however imperfectly, apart from the dynamics of partisan struggle. Perhaps, after decades of such thoroughgoing instrumentalization of legal processes, the regime is no longer able, or no longer feels the need, to maintain this pretense.

Fragilities of undisguised warfare

Bleak as that is, the collapse of lawfare into outright warfare brings its own fragilities. This is chiefly because lawfare’s effectiveness as a political strategy depends on the legal domain preserving some autonomy – nominal or real – from the ends it is made to serve. Otto Kirchheimer, the preeminent theorist of political trials, offered one of the most nuanced accounts of this relationship, exploring the variety of ways in which courts may be enlisted for political ends and how, under certain conditions, they may even serve the kind of liberal polity he valued. At the center of his account was the courtroom and its peculiar capacity to elevate matters from “the realm of private happenings and partisan constructions” into a higher register, one in which even those who lose may still regard outcomes as impartial and authoritative.

That possibility is largely unavailable in the campaign against İmamoğlu, which many see as warfare plain and simple. In this respect, the secrecy surrounding Silivri is both understandable and telling. Because, if lawfare cannot cast its opponent as a criminal in the public mind, it can still keep him from public view. I do not mean to suggest that a year of imprisonment is unimportant. Keeping İmamoğlu away has given, and will continue to give, the regime real breathing space within which negotiations can be reopened and alliances reworked. Ultimately, even if people are not persuaded by the corruption allegations, they may still come to treat his absence as settled and natural. That is why the counter-strategy must be, above all, a mobilizational one, centered on resisting the normalization of İmamoğlu’s removal from political life. This, I think, is what Özgür Özel, the leader of the CHP, has been doing with considerable skill over the past year. He has kept the party firmly behind İmamoğlu’s candidacy, pressed the factual inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case, and raised pointed questions about Gürlek’s personal finances and integrity.

I am not sure which of the available terms in the literature – autocratic lawfare, autocratic legalism, rule-of-law backsliding, show trial – best captures the idiosyncrasies of the barrage of cases against İmamoğlu. Perhaps none does full justice to it. Perhaps what matters more than terminological exactitude is whether we grasp the distinctiveness of the present moment and respond accordingly. That response must seize on these fragilities as grounds for a counter-politics capable of undermining Silivri and all that it stands for.

It is in this sense that Turkey is unlike Mike Campbell, whom Hemingway used to embody the exhaustion of a lost generation. No one person, fortunately, writes Turkey’s story. Whether the country descends into bankruptcy will depend on what people do, what they remember, and what they refuse to forget in the months and years ahead. In the end, who wins and who loses will be determined by political contestation, not by trials or judicial decrees. That is why it is worth recalling that the campaign against İmamoğlu is not fated to succeed, especially if earlier experiments with lawfare have proved dismal failures. The opposition must preserve that sense of possibility and agency, while never losing sight of how much darker the present conjuncture has become.

Many thanks to İlker Aytürk for reading this piece and, in particular, for a critical suggestion that I hope is reflected in the final version. 

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In der Diskussion um wirksameren Gewaltschutz gilt Spanien vielen als Vorbild. Dort hat auch Fernandes Anzeige erstattet, weil ihr (Ex-)Ehemann dort seinen Hauptwohnsitz hat und sie sich besseren Schutz versprach – Deutschland hingegen sei ein „Täterparadies“. Dabei hatte gerade Spanien lange den Ruf, ein erzkonservatives Macho-Land zu sein. Heute allerdings wird es als Vorreiter für Feminismus und Gleichstellung gefeiert. Was also macht Spanien anders und was kann Deutschland lernen?

Ana Orantes‘ Tod als Wendepunkt

Auslöser dieser Wende ist eine Tragödie. Im Jahr 1997 erzählte die Spanierin Ana Orantes in einem TV-Interview von der massiven psychischen und physischen Gewalt, der sie und ihre Kinder über 40 Ehejahre durch ihren Ex-Mann ausgesetzt waren. Obwohl Orantes mehrfach zur Polizei ging und sich scheiden ließ, sobald dies rechtlich möglich war, blieb ihr Hilfe verwehrt. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt existierten weder in Spanien noch irgendwo sonst in Europa Schutzgesetze gegen häusliche Gewalt.

Wenige Tage nach dem Interview zündete Orantes‘ Ex-Mann sie bei lebendigem Leib an. Ihr Tod schockierte die spanische Gesellschaft und rückte häusliche Gewalt gegen Frauen als strukturelles Problem ins öffentliche Bewusstsein. In der Folge forderten Frauenverbände und Demonstrant:innen die Parteien auf, häusliche Gewalt endlich zu bekämpfen. Auf Vorschlag der rechtskonservativen Partido Popular reformierte der spanische Gesetzgeber das Strafgesetzbuch (Código Penal – CP). Zwar kennt das spanische ebenso wie das deutsche Strafgesetzbuch keinen eigenständigen Straftatbestand des Femi(ni)zids – also die Tötung einer Frau, weil sie eine Frau ist –, doch erfasst Art. 153 CP nun ausdrücklich physische und psychische Gewalt gegen Frauen im häuslichen Kontext.

Das spanische Gendergewaltschutzgesetz

Wichtiger noch war die Einführung des Gendergewaltschutzgesetzes als erstes Projekt der sozialistischen Regierung unter Präsident Zapatero im Jahr 2004. Mit der einstimmig verabschiedeten Ley Orgánica 1/2004 de Medidas de Protección Integral contra la Violencia de Género (Gesetz über umfassende Schutzmaßnahmen gegen genderspezifische Gewalt – LIVG) entstand ein spanisches Pioniergesetz, das vielen Ländern als Vorbild diente.

Das Erfolgskonzept ergibt sich schon aus dem Titel: ein umfassendes Gesamtgesetz zum Schutze vor genderspezifischer Gewalt. Es wirkt in nahezu alle Bereiche, vom Arbeits- und Sozialrecht ins Beamtenrecht, ins Zivil- und Strafrecht sowie in die jeweiligen Prozessordnungen. Zugleich stellt das Gesetz in seiner Begründung klar, dass es nicht geschlechtsneutral häusliche Gewalt adressiert, sondern explizit und gezielt Gewalt von Männern gegen ihre (Ex)-Partnerinnen bekämpfen will. Der spanische Gesetzgeber erkannte damit an, dass die größte Gefahr für eine Frau (und deren Kinder) oft der Mann ist, mit dem sie Bett und Tisch teilt – egal, ob mit oder ohne Eheschein.

Sensibilisierung, Bildung, Prävention

Das Gesetz beschränkt sich nicht nur auf die Bestrafung von Tätern. Es zielt vor allem darauf, Gewalt gegen Frauen gesellschaftlich sichtbar zu machen und präventiv zu verhindern. Entsprechend setzt das LIVG früh an: bei Sozialisation und Bildung.

In jeder Bildungsstufe – vom Kindergarten bis zur Universität – sind Institutionen verpflichtet, auf die Gleichstellung und den Respekt zwischen den Geschlechtern hinzuarbeiten. Bereits Kindergartenkinder sollen Methoden zur friedlichen Konfliktbewältigung (Art. 4, Nr. 2 LIVG) lernen. Verschiedene andere Maßnahmen, wie ein Verbot von frauendiskriminierender und demütigender Werbung (Art. 10 LIVG), sollen dafür sorgen, dass Frauenhass bereits im Kern erstickt wird. Es richtet sich ausdrücklich gegen die Vorstellung, Frauen seien „Menschen zweiter Klasse“. Der Staat versteht Gewaltprävention damit als gesamtgesellschaftliche Aufgabe.

Prozessrechtliche Änderungen

Auch in rechtlicher Sicht geht das LIVG neue Wege. Es schafft erstinstanzliche Gerichte (Art. 43 ff. LIVG) und Staatsanwaltschaften für Gewalt gegen Frauen (Art. 70 ff. LIVG). Diese spezialgerichtlichen Juzgados de Violencia sobre la Mujer sind in ihrer Form einzigartig: Sie sind zwar auf strafrechtlicher Ebene verankert, verfügen aber zugleich über zahlreiche zivilrechtliche Kompetenzen, die im Rahmen von Gewaltdelikten zu Lasten von Frauen besonders relevant sind, etwa im Bereich Sorgerecht, Scheidung und Entschädigung.

So kann sich eine betroffene Frau also im Strafprozess auch von ihrem Angreifer scheiden lassen. Diese Bündelung verhindert parallele Verfahren und entlastet die Betroffenen erheblich. In Deutschland hingegen wirkt die Fragmentierung der Zuständigkeiten in Straf-, Familien- und Zivilgerichten überfordernd und kann im schlimmsten Fall abschreckend sein.

Materiell-rechtliche Gewährleistungen

Besonders deutlich zeigt sich der Unterschied zwischen Deutschland und Spanien in materiell-rechtlicher Hinsicht. Das LIVG garantiert Betroffenen umfassende Rechte: Zugang zu Informationen, kostenlose rechtliche Beratung, psychosoziale und medizinische Betreuung, finanzielle Unterstützung und Wiedergutmachung.

Entscheidend ist der verbindliche Anspruchscharakter. Hilfe hängt nicht von verfügbaren Kapazitäten oder Zufällen ab, sondern besteht als einklagbares Recht. Während Frauenhäuser in Deutschland regelmäßig überlastet sind und Aufnahmeplätze fehlen, verpflichtet das LIVG den Staat, ausreichende Kapazitäten bereitzustellen. Es verlangt zudem, besondere Belastungen wie familiäre Verpflichtungen, Behinderungen oder fehlende Sprachkenntnisse zu berücksichtigen und den Betroffenen Zugang zu Hilfen aktiv zu ermöglichen.

Dieser Schutzanspruch endet aber nicht im Privaten, sondern erfasst auch das Arbeitsleben von Frauen: Arbeitnehmerinnen und Beamtinnen können ihre Arbeitszeit reduzieren oder anpassen. Verspätungen und Abwesenheiten aufgrund ihrer spezifischen Situation gelten als entschuldigt. Der Zugang zu Unterstützung ist niedrigschwellig organisiert: Über die kostenlose Hotline 016 können Betroffene rund um die Uhr in 51 Sprachen Hilfe suchen. Diese Nummer erscheint nicht auf Telefonabrechnungen und schützt so vor Entdeckung.

Das LIVG wurde seit seiner Einführung bereits mehrfach reformiert, insbesondere zur Umsetzung der Istanbul-Konvention. Inzwischen sind auch betroffene Kinder sowie weitere Formen der Gewalt (z. B. Sklaverei im Zusammenhang mit Menschenhandel, Genitalverstümmelung, Zwangsheirat) vom LIVG erfasst.

Das spanische Modell zur Verhütung von Femiziden

Ergänzende Regelungen finden sich außerhalb des LIVG. Wie das deutsche Gewaltschutzgesetz kennt auch das spanische Recht diverse Maßnahmen zur Prävention, wie das Annäherungsverbot, das im Falle partnerschaftlicher Gewalt zwingend anzuordnen ist. Gerichte können zudem elektronische Überwachungsmaßnahmen verhängen (Art. 48 Abs. 4 CP).

Das entscheidende Instrument hierzu ist die elektronische Fußfessel (pulsera antimaltrato). Anders als in Deutschland trägt nicht nur der Gefährder ein solches Gerät: Auch die betroffene Frau erhält einen GPS-Empfänger. Nähert sich der Täter über die festgelegte Distanz hinaus, werden sowohl die Polizei als auch die Betroffene direkt gewarnt – unabhängig davon, wo sich die Frau aufhält. In Deutschland beschränkt sich die Überwachung meist auf starre Verbotszonen wie den Wohn- oder Arbeitsort. Sobald das Opfer diesen Bereich verlässt, bleibt es schutzlos etwa gegenüber „Zufallsbegegnungen“.

Seit der Einführung der pulsera antimaltrato im Jahr 2009 wurde in rund 13.000 Hochrisikofällen keine der überwachten Frauen ermordet. Vergleichbare Zahlen existieren für Deutschland nicht. Sie wären aber ohnehin wenig aussagekräftig, denn diese Maßnahme kommt bislang selten zum Einsatz. Im Jahr 2025 trugen lediglich 129 verurteilte Sexualstraftäter eine Fußfessel, obwohl etwa 1.400 rückfällige Sexualstraftäter erfasst wurden. Immerhin legte die Bundesregierung im Februar 2026 einen Gesetzesentwurf zur Einführung der „spanischen Fußfessel“ vor (BT-Drs. 21/4082).

So überzeugend der opferzentrierte Ansatz des LIVG ist, bleibt eine Leerstelle: Das Gesetz erfasst nicht alle Formen partnerschaftlicher Gewalt. Menschen in homosexuellen Partnerschaften und Trans-Personen sind zwar in vergleichbarem oder höherem Maße betroffen, erhalten aber durch keinen gleichwertigen Zugang zu Schutzmaßnahmen. Hier formuliert der deutsche Gesetzesentwurf zur Änderung des Gewaltschutzgesetzes neutraler.

Verstoß gegen den Gleichheitsgrundsatz?

Bald nach Inkrafttreten des LIVG kritisierten vor allem (oft männlich geprägte) Kreise aus Justiz und Politik die Regelungen als diskriminierend. Kritiker:innen bewerteten insbesondere die Schärfungen diverser Straftatbestände, die greifen, wenn ein Mann Täter und seine weibliche (Ex-)Partnerin das Opfer ist, als Verstoß gegen den verfassungsrechtlichen Gleichheitssatz (Art. 14 der spanischen Verfassung). So erhöht sich etwa der Strafrahmen für eine einfache Körperverletzung von drei Monaten bis drei Jahren (Art. 147 Abs. 1 CP) auf zwei bis fünf Jahre (Art. 148 Nr. 4 CP, eingeführt durch Art. 36 des LIVG). Andersherum gilt das nicht.

Das spanische Verfassungsgericht erklärte diese Differenzierung im Jahr 2008 jedoch für verfassungsgemäß. Es begründete dies mit der spezifischen strukturellen Gewaltkonstellation: Die Tat ziele auf die Herabsetzung der Frau als gleichberechtigtes Subjekt und beeinträchtige ihre Sicherheit sowie die tatsächliche Ausübung ihrer Grundrechte (STC 59/2008, Fundamentos Juridicos, Rn. 9).

Spanien als Vorbild

Das LIVG markiert einen zentralen Schritt im Kampf gegen Gewalt an Frauen in Spanien. Entscheidend sind dabei weniger verschärfte Strafdrohungen als der integrierte, präventive und opferzentrierte Ansatz. Das zeigt sich auch empirisch: Während in Deutschland 0,89 Frauen pro 100.000 Einwohner:innen durch ihren (Ex-)Partner getötet werden, liegt die Quote in Spanien bei 0,45. Ähnliche Gesetze, wie in Brasilien das Lei da Maria da Penha, haben nachweislich vergleichbare Effekte erzielt.

Wirksamer Schutz erfordert daher mehr als eine Ausweitung des Strafrechts. Er setzt voraus, dass Betroffene niedrigschwelligen Zugang zu Unterstützung erhalten und dass die Gesellschaft als solche Verantwortung für die Gleichstellung und den Schutz von Frauen übernimmt. Spanien hat mit der parteiübergreifenden, einstimmigen Verabschiedung des LIVG ein deutliches Signal gesetzt: Gewalt gegen Frauen, getarnt als leichtfüßige Macho-Kultur, duldet der Staat nicht.

Diese Unterschiede spiegeln sich auch in der juristischen Ausbildung. Ronen Steinke wies kürzlich darauf hin, dass sich das deutsche Examen ohne Kenntnisse des Sexualstrafrechts bestehen lässt, während Spezialmaterien wie die forderungsentkleidete Hypothek zum Pflichtstoff gehören. In Spanien (ebenso wie in Brasilien) zählt das Sexualstrafrecht dagegen zum Kernbereich der Ausbildung. In Deutschland wird der Stoff mit Verweis auf eine mögliche Retraumatisierung nicht unterrichtet. Doch müsste das nicht auch für andere krasse Fälle, die im Studium bearbeitet werden, gelten? Wie Eva Maria Bredler darlegt, erhöht dieser blinde Fleck die Gefahr sexistischer Rechtsauslegung und -anwendung. Viele Richter:innen erkennen Femi(ni)zide nicht als solche, weil ihnen einfach das Wissen über Dynamiken geschlechtsspezifischer Gewalt fehlt.

Das zeigt sich ganz besonders deutlich beim Umgang mit Vergewaltigungsdelikten. Verfällt das Opfer in eine Schockstarre, wird unter dem „Nein heißt Nein“-Grundsatz im deutschen Recht regelmäßig kein entgegenstehender Wille erkannt – und eine Strafbarkeit verneint. Auch hier geht Spanien weiter und hat – im Einklang mit den Vorgaben der Istanbul-Konvention – mit dem Solo sí es sí-Gesetz das Prinzip „Nur Ja heißt Ja“ zum Schutz der sexuellen Freiheit verankert.

Auch jenseits des Gewaltschutzes verfolgt Spanien Gleichstellung konsequent. Gleichheits- und Paritätsgesetze haben dafür gesorgt, den Gender Pay Gap auf 9% zu senken (Deutschland: 18%) und den Frauenanteil im Parlament auf 44% (Deutschland: 32,4%) zu erhöhen.

Natürlich ist auch in Spanien nicht alles rosarot: Häusliche Gewalt und auch Femi(ni)zide geschehen weiterhin und insbesondere für Trans-Personen bestehen Schutzlücken. Dennoch setzt das LIVG Maßstäbe: Es behandelt Gewalt gegen Frauen als strukturelle Herausforderung. Um Opfern schnelle und unbürokratische Hilfe zu ermöglichen, organisiert es den Gewaltschutz entsprechend umfassend.

In Deutschland dagegen bleibt der Gewaltschutz vielfach zersplittert. Unterschiedliche Zuständigkeiten, unklare Verfahren und fehlende Sensibilisierung bei Behörden und Gerichten erschweren den Zugang zu Hilfe. Für viele Frauen kommt sie zu spät – 328 von ihnen wurden allein 2024 getötet. Was fehlt, ist nicht nur ein Gesetz wie das LIVG, sondern die spanische Entschlossenheit, Gewalt gegen Frauen politisch konsequent zu bekämpfen.

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Beyond clear violations of freedom of expression and association aimed at silencing critical voices, the Georgian case reveals a structural gap in criminal law theory and practice – the lack of substantive limits on criminalization and the misleading presumption of state good faith in criminalization theory. At the same time, the Georgian case shows that this need not be so. At least two concrete rules against criminalization emerge from the Georgian case, namely, that conduct cannot be criminalized solely because government authorization is denied and/or based on mere suspicion about harmfulness. The Georgian case also shows that the failure to review criminalization for bad faith misses the opportunity to provide the most tailored and needed response to the ultimate tool of autocratization – criminalization of all dissent.

Georgia’s Foreign Agent Law 3.0

Under the new amendments, a “grant” is defined so broadly that it encompasses virtually any transfer, monetary or in-kind, from a foreign source to a Georgian individual or entity if the funds are used to influence “any part of society” regarding domestic policy.¹⁾ Failure to obtain prior authorization for such funding now triggers criminal liability when an organization or individual engages in political expression. Sanctions include imprisonment for up to six years. Furthermore, the legislative package aggravates money laundering offenses when undertaken for the purpose of influencing politics in Georgia, raising potential penalties to twelve years.

The result is a system where (unauthorized) foreign funding alone transforms otherwise lawful conduct into a criminal offence. Criminality now depends not on independently wrongful conduct, but on two elements: a foreign link, however tenuous, and the absence of government authorization.

The Missing Theory of Criminalization

Few theorists have discussed substantive limits to criminalization, while those who did tend to presume that the state acts in good faith when criminalizing conduct to prevent some public harm, however trivial (see, e.g., Husak). This theoretical framework is no longer adequate in contexts like Georgia, where criminal law is weaponized against all forms of dissent, targeting conduct that threatens no genuine public interest, but only the ruler’s grip on power.

The Georgian case not only exposes the limitations of criminalization theories that presume the state’s good faith in preventing actual harm to societal interests but also demonstrates how concrete limits on criminalization can operate in practice. At least two such rules can be drawn from the Georgian case: first, conduct cannot be criminalized solely because authorization is denied, where the same conduct is lawful if authorized; second, conduct cannot be criminalized on the basis of mere suspicion about harmfulness, where the underlying act is not inherently wrongful.

Indeed, the absence of state authorization does not render conduct wrongful, just as mere suspicion of harm cannot substitute for actual harmfulness. Violation of such basic standards naturally raises the question of whether the state has any legitimate purpose in criminalizing the conduct. Such concrete rules that operationalize abstract criminalization theories and whose breach triggers an inquiry into state good faith are particularly necessary for contexts of autocratization such as Georgia, where bad-faith state action has become the new norm.

ECtHR’s Articles 7 and 18 Gap

The ECtHR is increasingly confronted with such contexts. The most evident, though delayed, adaptation to this new reality has occurred under Article 18 ECHR, which prohibits restrictions of rights for any purpose other than that for which they have been prescribed, i.e., for ulterior purposes. This shift became visible with the relaxation of evidentiary standards in Merabishvili v. Georgia in 2017, in which the Grand Chamber held that the evidentiary standard of “beyond reasonable doubt” is sufficient to establish a predominant ulterior purpose, replacing the previously required threshold of incontrovertible proof. While the Court now frequently applies Article 18  in cases involving pre‑trial detention pending trial (see Navalnyy v. Russia; Selahattin Demirtaş v. Turkey (No. 2)), it has still refrained from extending Article 18 to the more intrusive context of criminalization itself under Article 7 – despite the fact that charges under Article 7 often form the basis for the very pre‑trial detentions scrutinized under Article 18. The Court justifies this inconsistent approach through a formal reading of Article 7 as an absolute guarantee of “no punishment without law.” This reading renders Article 7 beyond restriction, so that Article 18, which expressly regulates the conditions under which rights may be restricted, is not applicable.

This is not to say that the current approach to Article 7 is entirely incapable of addressing undue criminalization. The Court has gradually expanded Article 7 beyond the prohibition of retroactivity to include prohibitions on: unforeseeable or inconsistent laws; use of criminal law by analogy; manifestly unreasonable judicial interpretations; strict liability without a mental element. However, without combining Article 7 with Article 18, ECtHR misses the opportunity to capture the reality in contexts such as Georgia – namely, that criminalization is not undue by error but by design. Such an accurate qualification is especially necessary when it comes to instrumentalized criminalization, which functions as the most powerful tool for chilling dissent and consolidating autocratic rule.

The Court’s formal justification for rejecting the applicability of Article 18 to Article 7 is unconvincing not only because calling a spade a spade is essential when the state’s motive for criminalization is self‑serving, but also because the Court’s own interpretation of Article 7 reveals its non‑absolute character. This is most evident in the inherently relative concepts of foreseeability (as in the requirement of foreseeable criminal law) and reasonableness (as in the prohibition of its manifestly unreasonable judicial interpretation), both of which necessarily introduce limitations. For instance, when elaborating on the principle of foreseeability, the Court states that the burden to seek judicial interpretation (Del Río Prada v. Spain [GC], Jorgic v. Germany) and even legal advice (Chauvy and Others v. France, Cantoni v. France) will not necessarily render norms unforeseeable. This suggests that Article 7 already contains implicit limits. Incoherence persists, however, when the Court refuses to invoke Article 18 in the context of Article 7 to address ulterior motives, reflecting an outdated view of the latter’s static absolute nature.

The pressure to develop limits on criminalization under Article 7, particularly with regard to state motives, will only intensify in autocratization contexts such as Georgia. The sooner the Court responds to this reality by adopting a more comprehensive and substantive interpretation of Article 7 – including allowing its combined use with Article 18 – the greater the prospects for doctrinal coherence. The Grand Chamber will have the opportunity to reject this excessively formal reading of the Article 7-18 relationship in the pending case Kavala v. Türkiye (No. 2) communicated this January. Its position will also be decisive for the ECtHR applications submitted from Georgia. The applicants argue that coordinated waves of amendments to the administrative and criminal offence codes, together with manifestly unreasonable interpretations by domestic courts, were designed to chill dissent and consolidate an autocratic regime – an argument that can be fully assessed only through a combined reading of Articles 7 and 18.

Conclusion

Georgia’s “foreign agent” law 3.0 as an instance of instrumentalizing criminal law exposes the structural need to further develop both criminalization theory and ECtHR jurisprudence under Article 7. The limiting principles on criminalization derived from the Georgian law in question, namely, that conduct cannot be criminalized solely based on lack of authorization and/or suspicion of harmfulness, demonstrate the feasibility and necessity of developing abstract theories in ways that enhance their practical relevance. The emerging case law under Article 7 can be read as moving, albeit implicitly, toward recognizing substantive limits on criminalization. Yet this development remains incomplete so long as it excludes an examination of the state’s good faith in adopting criminal prohibitions, leaving the jurisprudence lagging behind the realities of autocratization contexts. Without such evolution, the ECtHR risks a paradox: harmless conduct may be criminalized without meaningful scrutiny under Article 7, even when driven by bad faith, while less intrusive measures, such as pre-trial detentions linked to those same offences, remain reviewable under Article 18.

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Framing economic warfare as state crime foregrounds its transnational and historical dimensions. Within this framework, tariffs and sanctions function as legally sanctioned tools of imperial statecraft and state-organized harm. From their colonial origins to their neoliberal reinvention and contemporary resurgence, tariff regimes have reinforced global hierarchies, facilitated accumulation, and produced structural violence. Contemporary US economic warfare against Cuba now marks a critical transformation in US economic statecraft: emergency powers expand tariff and sanction authority to penalize third states for lawful trade, undermining international legal norms while generating severe humanitarian consequences. Grounded in a long history of US interventionism in the region, this deliberate economic coercion constitutes an instance of imperial state crime.

The blockade of Cuba

The blockade originated with President Donald J. Trump’s January 29, 2026, executive order, “Addressing Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba.” The executive order frames Cuba as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” aligned with Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (NEA), and Section 301 of Title 3 of the US Code, the order declared a national emergency and authorized sweeping tariffs against any country that directly or indirectly provides oil to Cuba. In effect, the order established a proxy fuel blockade. Rather than directly interdicting shipments, it threatened third countries with punitive duties, making continued energy trade with Cuba economically and politically costly.

Oil, defined broadly to include crude and petroleum products, thus becomes the central object of coercion. Once the Secretary of Commerce determines that a country supplies oil to Cuba, the administration may impose additional ad valorem duties on that country’s exports to the US. Access to the US market is thereby conditioned on compliance with Washington’s sanctions regime, transforming tariffs into instruments of sanctions enforcement and extending US jurisdiction into global energy markets. This represents a qualitative shift in economic statecraft: trade policy is reconfigured as a mechanism of extraterritorial coercion embedded within a broader structure of imperial governance.

The weaponization of energy

The consequences have been immediate and severe. Since the end of the Cold War, Cuba has relied heavily on oil from Venezuela and Mexico. Following the US extra-judicial capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, and the disruption of Venezuelan oil exports, shipments to Cuba declined sharply. Simultaneously, the Trump administration signaled that countries continuing to supply fuel could face tariffs, effectively deterring Mexico and other suppliers. The result was a sudden contraction in Cuba’s fuel supply, estimated at a reduction of approximately 90%.

The humanitarian consequences of the fuel blockade have been immediate and far-reaching. Reports indicate that an estimated 11,000 children are awaiting surgery, while more than 96,000 people in Cuba require medical procedures that hospitals have struggled to provide due to electricity shortages and lack of supplies. Blackouts have also forced schools, government offices, and public institutions to close. Airlines have canceled flights due to insufficient jet fuel, disrupting tourism and mobility. Hospitals, water systems, refrigeration, food distribution networks, and transportation infrastructures all rely on petroleum-based electricity generation.

On February 12, 2026, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the executive order as “a serious violation of international law and a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order.” UN human rights experts further characterized the measure as “an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion with extraterritorial effects,” warning that it compels sovereign states to alter lawful commercial relations under threat of punitive trade measures. They underscored that, absent UN Security Council authorization, the order lacks legitimacy under the principle of collective security and is incompatible with international law. Moreover, they emphasized that there is no recognized right under international law for one state to penalize third states for engaging in lawful trade, and that restricting fuel imports in an already fragile context risks constituting collective punishment of civilians.

Economic warfare

This escalation must be understood within a broader regional strategy. The Trump administration has articulated a new hemispheric doctrine or the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting unilateral authority over Latin America and the Caribbean. This doctrine has been accompanied by intensified coercive practices, including more than 20 lethal boat strikes, killing over 80 people, actions described by the United Nations and human rights organizations as extrajudicial executions. Within this context, the blockade of Cuba is not an isolated measure but part of a wider project of regional restructuring and domination. President Trump himself has framed the policy in explicitly geopolitical terms, stating that he would have “the honor of taking Cuba” and signaling that President Miguel Díaz-Canel should resign. These statements clarify the underlying logic of the blockade: regime change through economic coercion, enacted through the weaponization of energy and the normalization of economic warfare as a modality of state power.

In this sense, the January 29 executive order marks a significant shift in the evolution of sanctions regimes. For decades, the US has relied on financial sanctions, export controls, and diplomatic pressure to isolate targeted states. A 2025 study  published in The Lancet Global Health suggests that US economic sanctions contribute to approximately 564,000 deaths annually worldwide.

The January 29 order introduces a hybrid model in which tariffs function as instruments of sanctions enforcement, extending coercive pressure through global supply chains and restructuring trade relations among sovereign states through unilateral threats backed by US economic power.

This shift reflects a broader transformation in US economic statecraft. Under President Trump, tariffs have reemerged as overt tools of economic warfare. During his first administration, tariffs on steel, aluminum, and hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese goods were justified on national security grounds. In his second administration, tariffs have been deployed more explicitly as instruments of coercion, including threats against countries purchasing Venezuelan oil and pressure on other disputes in Latin America. Trump has framed “tariffs as punishment” as a preferable to traditional sanctions, particularly where financial measures risk encouraging de-dollarization.

Emergency powers

This strategy relies heavily on the expansive use of emergency powers. The administration has drawn on the IEEPA, Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose tariffs and sanctions with minimal congressional oversight. Enacted in 1977, IEEPA authorizes the president to regulate commerce during national emergencies that threaten US security, economy, or foreign policy. Since its enactment, IEEPA has been used to declare national emergencies 69 times, 39 of which remain active, addressing broad issues such as weapons proliferation and terrorism. The legality of many such declarations is contested, particularly where the threats invoked fail to meet the statutory threshold of being “unusual and extraordinary.”

The use of emergency powers to impose tariffs has historical precedent. Christopher Casey traces this practice to President Nixon’s 1971 invocation of the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) to impose a 10% import surcharge. Although framed as a temporary measure to stabilize the dollar, the policy functioned as economic leverage to pressure Japan and West Germany into revaluing their currencies. Congress later preserved key elements of TWEA within IEEPA, enabling future expansions of executive authority. Similarly, Sections 232 and 301 have justified tariffs under national security and trade enforcement claims.

The elasticity of “emergency,” “national security,” and “economic threat” allows the executive to construct crises and deploy coercive legal measures with significant social consequences. As Elizabeth Goitein notes, the NEA activates more than 150 statutory powers upon a presidential declaration. Yet IEEPA neither mentions tariffs nor provides a legislative basis for such use. At the international level, these policies undermine the multilateral trade order, violating principles of non-discrimination and reciprocity under GATT and the WTO, while contributing to the paralysis of global enforcement mechanisms.

On February 20, 2026, the US Supreme Court ruled in  Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA cannot be used to impose tariffs. Although the decision limits tariff-based secondary sanctions and weakens the legal basis of the January 29 order targeting Cuba, it leaves intact tariffs under Sections 232 and 301 and does not dismantle the broader architecture of US economic coercion.

The US Embargo to Cuba as an act of aggression

The US has maintained a near-total trade embargo on Cuba since 1962, costing the island an estimated $130 billion in lost revenue. As one of the longest-standing and most restrictive regimes of economic coercion, US sanctions have significantly undermined Cuba’s economic development by restricting access to goods, services, financial resources, and international markets. Elsewhere, I have argued that this form of collective punishment constitutes a manifestation of imperial state crime.

That is from the outset, US economic warfare was geostrategic, responding to the Cuban Revolution’s challenge to the US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. The embargo blocked Cuba’s access to global markets and disrupted its trade with third countries and its participation in international financial systems. It began with a trade ban imposed in October 1960 by the Eisenhower administration following Cuba’s nationalization of oil refineries and agrarian reforms. In February 1962, President Kennedy formalized the embargo through Executive Order 3447 under the TWEA, which, alongside the Cuban Assets Control Regulations of 1963, imposed sweeping restrictions on trade, travel, and financial transactions designed to destabilize the Cuban government.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba partially mitigated the effects of the embargo through trade with the Soviet Union, but the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991 triggered a severe economic crisis, reducing trade by 75–80 percent. Subsequent US policies deepened these constraints. The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 (Torricelli Act) prohibited foreign subsidiaries of US companies from trading with Cuba, contradicting international commercial law, which defines corporate nationality by place of incorporation rather than ownership. It also barred ships docking in Cuba from entering US ports and authorized the withholding of aid from countries assisting Cuba. The 1996 Helms-Burton Act further entrenched the embargo into law, extending US jurisdiction extraterritorially by allowing lawsuits against foreign companies operating on nationalized property.

The embargo has had lasting structural effects. Restrictions on US dollar transactions increase exchange costs and deter foreign banks from engaging with Cuban institutions due to the risk of secondary sanctions. These financial restrictions have also constrained key sectors such as tourism, limiting investment and development. While the Obama administration briefly eased some restrictions, these changes were largely reversed under President Trump, who intensified the economic warfare by reinstating Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list and activating Title III of the Helms-Burton Act. The Trump administration also restricted remittances by blocking FINCIMEX and forcing Western Union to halt operations, cutting off a vital source of income for many Cuban households. These policies resulted in over-compliance by financial institutions and impeded even humanitarian transactions, including access to food, medicine, and essential goods.

Over time, the cumulative effects of the embargo have deepened Cuba’s economic and social crises. Economic warfare and the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to prolonged economic decline, the migration of more than 4% of the population, and the collapse of the island’s electrical system, resulting in widespread blackouts since 2024.

The international community has repeatedly rejected the legitimacy of the US embargo. On October 29, 2025, the UN General Assembly condemned US sanctions on Cuba, with 165 member states supporting calls to end punitive legislation such as the Helms-Burton Act, which many countries argue violates international law and the UN Charter.

Targeting energy, reshaping order

The January 29 executive order intensifies this historical trajectory. By directly targeting oil, it moves beyond general economic restrictions to strike at the foundational infrastructure of Cuban society. Fuel is indispensable for electricity generation, water purification, hospital operations, transportation, and food production; restricting access to it produces systemic effects across the entire economy.

More broadly, the order reflects the normalization of economic warfare through emergency powers. IEEPA and the NEA were designed as extraordinary authorities, yet they have become routine instruments for reshaping global economic relations.

For Cuba, the immediate result is a manufactured oil crisis. For the international legal order, the consequence is the erosion of multilateral norms and the expansion of extraterritorial coercion. Economic warfare is often presented as targeted and precise, but when they disrupt energy systems, their effects are widespread and indiscriminate. Fuel becomes leverage. Tariffs become punishment. And an already vulnerable population is pushed further into crisis.

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Valérie Bélair-Gagnon

When we talk about AI and fact-checking, we often fixate on the informational: the deepfake, the viral lie, or the bot. Yet the disinformation crisis is fundamentally institutional. We have reached a crossroads where we must shift our focus from the viral lie to the underlying political economy that shapes who defines truth, and at what cost. If we fix the information but leave the infrastructure of truth-making in the hands of a few market-driven empires, we have not solved the disinformation crisis; we have simply automated it. 

This institutional struggle is at the heart of the anti-disinformation assemblage, a contingent, often messy configuration of platforms, states, technology organizations, and editorial actors. In an ongoing collaborative book project, my co-authors and I argue that this assemblage is currently undergoing a profound fragmentation. These diverse actors are held together by a struggle for definitional authority: the power to decide what constitutes a social problem and what requires an intervention.

The Response-Side Gap

If you look at the last decade of interdisciplinary research on disinformation, there is a massive supply-side bias. We have thousands of papers on how disinformation is produced and why people believe it, but there is a lacuna on the response side. We need to know more about how the institutions responding to the crisis actually allocate authority in practice. 

Governance interventions in this field often reinforce existing hierarchies. When we introduce AI into this mix, we are adding a tool for efficiency and automating existing institutional biases. This occurs in the automation of harm detection over veracity. During high-stakes elections, platforms deploy AI to suppress borderline content, material that violates policy, and risks brand reputation. This shifts the goal from a shared pursuit of truth to a mechanical pursuit of market stability. AI tools are programmed to find what is least disruptive to a platform's advertising ecosystem. We are thus moving from state-led propaganda to platform-led digital governance, in which the authority to verify information has shifted from public bodies to private, algorithmic entities. 

Three Pillars of the AI-Truth Economy

As we explore this shift, three critical questions emerge:

1. Does AI reshuffle or entrench power? Most AI tools are beholden to the walled gardens of platforms. If a fact-checking startup builds an AI detection tool, its survival depends on API access granted by Meta or Google. In this context, AI centralizes verification infrastructure rather than democratizing it.

2. Is the goal truth or market stability? AI moderation is implemented because it is scalable and cost-effective, not because it is the most accurate. We are seeing an epistemological relativism where “harm,” which carries legal and brand risks, is prioritized over “veracity.”

3. Has “truth” become a luxury good? We are currently in what our team identifies as the "Retraction Era" (2022–2025). Platforms are scaling back human trust and safety teams in favor of AI to reduce costs. By failing to mandate "human-in-the-loop" oversight, law and policy have allowed a global decoupling: while the Global North retains some algorithmic protections, the Global South is left with automated-only moderation. 

Consider the Tigray War in Ethiopia. While English-language content enjoys layers of human and algorithmic oversight, internal documents, such as the Facebook Papers, revealed that Meta’s AI systems were blind to languages like Amharic and Oromo. Inflammatory calls for ethnic violence remained active for days because AI tools lacked the linguistic nuance to identify the threat. Platforms prioritized the high-cost maintenance of "truth" in Western markets while leaving the Global South to be moderated by black-box systems that could not recognize the significance of the language until violence had already spilled into the streets. 

Scaling the Analysis: Macro, Meso, and Micro

To understand how this functions, we must look at the anti-disinformation assemblage at three levels:

*       Macro Level: Three digital empires are currently projecting power. The U.S. follows a neoliberal model, privileging free markets; the EU acts as a regulatory superpower focusing on rights; and China utilizes a state-driven model of surveillance. AI is the technical and legal force currently shaping the boundaries of acceptable speech globally.

*       Meso Level: Initiatives such as Vera.ai and Logically Intelligence have framed disinformation as a technical problem, solvable with software. This technologizing of fact-checking turns an epistemic struggle into a data-management task. Similarly, X’s Community Notes shifts the labor of truth-seeking onto unpaid users, turning a political debate into a ranking problem.

*       Micro Level: Consider the human fact-checker. Unlike traditional journalists, fact-checkers make explicit epistemic judgments. When President Biden claimed his uncle was eaten by cannibals, legacy outlets reported the claim without evidence but hesitated to label it a lie; independent fact-checkers like Snopes made an explicit judgment. Yet, as these actors partner with platforms, they become serfs, a precarious labor force for the very tech giants they are meant to monitor. 

Moving Past the Disinformation Crisis

We must recognize that AI and law are not just tools; they are reflections of a crisis of trust in professional authority. 

To counter the walled gardens of the digital empires, we must move toward a public-interest infrastructure. Regulators should mandate that platforms provide real-time API access to independent researchers. To stop global decoupling, we must regulate the quality of AI, not just its output quantity, perhaps by mandating specific ratios of human local experts. 

Law and policy can regulate bad content while simultaneously addressing the asymmetries of truth-making. If we do not address the infrastructure, we have not solved the crisis. We have automated it.

Collaborators on the forthcoming book project include: Steen Steensen (OsloMet), Rebekah Larsen (MIT), Lucas Graves (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid), Bente Kalsnes (Kristiana University College), Oscar Westlund (OsloMet/Gothenburg), Lasha Kavtaradze (Kristiana University College), and Reidun Samuelsen (Norwegian Media Authority).

This sharp policy change – a return to a policy that was discarded nearly 30 years ago due to scientific and ethical concerns, along with implementation challenges – has been in the cards since Kirsty Coventry took the helm of the IOC last year. This post provides a first critical analysis of the justifications put forward by the IOC to defend its U-turn on genetic sex testing, revealing the scientific, procedural, and legal shortcomings of the new policy.

A policy grounded in “scientific consensus”: the IOC’s fairytale

The IOC justifies its new policy primarily by invoking the need to protect the female category from “biological males” due to their alleged performance advantage in sports and events that rely on strength, power, and/or endurance. This claim relies entirely on the scientific review conducted by a working group created by Kirsty Coventry early on in her tenure as IOC President. Here lies a central, and fatal, weakness of the policy. The working group in question operated in total opacity and neither the names of its members nor its purported scientific findings have been made public. You don’t need to have a PhD in epistemology to know that this is not what one would expect from a rigorous scientific process, especially if it claims to have achieved a consensus in a particular field. Instead, one would expect, at the very least, a working group with a transparent and diverse membership of reputable scientists, collective processes of deliberation allowing for open debates and disagreements, and publication of its review in a leading peer-reviewed journal. This is the basis of scientific legitimacy, as opposed to a handpicked anonymous group reaching sweeping conclusions behind closed doors and unwilling to publish its findings or face counterarguments before announcing its discovery of a consensus in a very controversial field. This plainly unscientific process is an indelible stain on the credibility of the IOC policy.

In fact, a quick review of the existing literature would show that whether trans and/or intersex women have a systematic and unfair sporting advantage is the subject of heated debate among scientists of various disciplines. The scientific community is extremely divided on the question, while limited empirical data is available because there are so few trans and intersex women competing in international sport. As the IOC should know, the state of existing scientific evidence on this subject will play an important role in future court cases, and the IOC’s claim of scientific consensus, which is nothing more than a fairytale, will be put to the test.

A policy grounded in “social consensus”: the IOC’s Potemkin consultation process

The legitimacy of the IOC policy is equally flimsy when it claims the existence of a “broad consensus” among female athletes and other Olympic Movement constituents. This claim is supported only with a vague allusion to an online “Athlete Survey” and “interviews with impacted athletes”, as well as discussions with the IOC Athletes Commission. Here as well, the IOC’s process and communication are sloppy at best. The survey sample, questions, and results are not published, nor are the findings of the individual interviews. It’s hard to believe that the IOC had no influence in putting together the sample for the survey and in the drafting of the questions posed. As qualitative researchers will know, these two dimensions can easily orient a survey in a desired direction and bias its results. The lack of transparency in this regard is telling. Similarly, the interviews are barely mentioned in the policy, which acknowledges “nuances” and therefore, in between the lines, some level of dissensus, but fails to explicate it further.

To think that such a poorly defined consultation process could lend any legitimacy to the IOC policy is to show very little regard for democratic participation, good governance, or qualitative methods. A representative deliberation is never easy to organise in a transnational setting, but what the IOC has offered falls well short of the mark. It might not be surprising that an institution, whose internal political system works primarily through cooptation and in which much of the power is concentrated in the hands of its President, would have little regard for democratic or participatory processes. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that the consultation sketched in the IOC policy will lend it much legitimacy when it is scrutinised by courts; this is not a governance process which deserves to be given any judicial deference or margin of appreciation.

A policy compatible with human rights: the IOC’s self-serving reading of the law

Finally, the IOC’s rosy assessment of the legality of its embrace of genetic sex testing is wishful thinking that disregards the fact that many legal experts and scholars have expressed strong doubts about it in public forums and academic literature. Moreover, very few legal scholars or human rights experts have been willing to line up in support of this policy so far. The policy faces a range of legal challenges including the illegality (and sometimes criminality) of genetic testing with no health purpose in many countries around the world; the strictures of data protection rules when genetic data is concerned; and the incompatibility of mandatory genetic sex testing with national and international human rights law. Indeed, President Coventry herself acknowledged that athletes might have to seek testing outside their home countries where it is contrary to domestic law.

While the IOC is right to state that “no supranational court has held that defining eligibility for the Female Category by reference to biological sex would constitute an unjustifiable infringement of individual and/or human rights”, the main reason for this is that the question has never been raised before one. Nevertheless, a great number of international legal experts (including ourselves), as well as UN human rights experts and rapporteurs, have recently expressed, in two separate statements, their shared view that mandatory genetic sex testing constitutes a disproportionate restriction of a range of human rights, including the rights to privacy, non-discrimination, and bodily and psychological integrity.

From a human rights perspective, the key question will be one of proportionality, as the existence of an interference with the rights of the athletes concerned is not really in doubt. The central legal question is therefore whether this policy is a necessary, reasonable, and proportionate means to achieving the IOC’s purported objectives of fairness and safety. This assessment will hinge in part on the existence, or lack, of scientific consensus regarding the systematic sporting advantage of trans athletes and athletes with sex variations. As already discussed, the IOC’s imagined “scientific consensus” advanced in the policy falls short in this regard. Moreover, the IOC policy does not provide any assessment of the necessity, reasonableness, and proportionality of its approach. It does not consider the extent of the harms that could result from its policy for the athletes concerned, and whether these harms are proportionate to the gains made in terms of the fairness or safety of the competitions – despite well over 100 civil society organizations emphasizing these harms.

With respect to women with sex variations, the IOC policy proposes to reassign their sex – on the basis of a genetic test and potentially invasive follow-up examinations – against their will (and the sovereign will of their State of birth) for the purpose of Olympic competitions. Such a consequential decision, which will affect people, including children, who have spent their entire lives as girls and women, will have tremendously adverse psychological, social, and economic impacts (already experienced by young athletes subjected to sex testing regimes), which can hardly be deemed proportionate unless the safety of another person is at a heightened risk. Meanwhile, trans women will be excluded from international sport regardless of their transition process and its effect on their sporting performance. By excluding members of one of the most marginalized groups in global society, the policy only exacerbates the stigma faced by the trans community within and beyond sport. Without going into further details at this point, there is no doubt that such a policy will result in considerable harm being brought upon a small minority of people.

Ultimately, the IOC policy will likely prove even more difficult to implement in practice than it was 30 years ago, due to a range of new legal limitations linked to the use of genetic testing and the storage of genetic data. More fundamentally, its proportionality will be quickly tested before national and European courts, and it will be the IOC’s burden to show what it has failed to convincingly argue until now: that its approach is a necessary, reasonable, and proportionate way to protect the fairness and safety of its competitions. Courts will want to see not only evidence to support the IOC’s scientific claims, but also a genuine assessment of the extent of the harms inflicted on those subjected to coerced genetic testing and those who stand to be excluded on its basis.

Conclusion

Let us conclude by making clear that we are not opposed in principle to rules regulating access to the women’s category (and likewise the men’s category) of competition. However, these rules must be devised with great care and through a transparent process open to public contestation. They must be grounded in concrete evidence of a systematic unfair advantage or heightened safety risks. If the sport governing bodies are unable to provide such evidence, then the doubt should benefit the athletes concerned. Indeed, the harms of an exclusionary policy are simply too big to justify the approach promoted by the new IOC policy, which assumes the existence of a general performance advantage and safety risk without demonstrating it. Furthermore, the IOC policy simply ignores its harmful effects on women and girls who, through no fault of their own, were born with an atypical genetic makeup or were assigned a sex at birth that does not match their gender identity. Moreover, genetic testing violates the rights of all women and girls, not least by subjecting them to surveillance in violation of legal restrictions on the use of genetic testing and the handling of genetic information. The IOC’s new policy is the result of an opaque and arbitrary process leading to a very harmful outcome – it should be tested in court and struck down to the extent that it violates domestic and international laws, including the strict requirements of proportionality.

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Biased allocation of radio frequencies and the media capture rulebook

Klubrádió has been a prominent radio station in Hungary, providing a platform for civil society actors, opposition politicians and independent experts. In 2021, its license for the Budapest frequency expired. The Media Council rejected its application for renewal of the license and subsequently declared Klubrádió’s application in a new tender procedure invalid. As a result, in February 2021, Klubrádió stopped broadcasting and has since operated solely online.

The Media Council cited a few administrative errors in justification of its decision: Klubrádió failed to send the Media Council monthly information on broadcasting quotas; a description of one of the programmes was missing in the tender application; and there was a five-minute difference in the program schedule indicated on two different forms. While these were minor errors, the Media Council argued that their accumulation amounted to “repeated infringement” that automatically precludes the renewal of a license agreement, as per Hungarian media law.

From a purely formal perspective, the Media Council did nothing more than follow the letter of the law. But when viewed in context, the Media Council’s decisions reflect a broader pattern of systemic pressure on independent media in Hungary. Klubrádió had been on the radar of the Media Council since the beginning of the Orbán regime in 2010: it had refused to renew earlier contracts, delayed decisions, and revoked Klubrádió’s licenses in the countryside, often relying on bizarre justifications such as the radio channel’s failure to sign the empty back pages of the contracts.

These tactics fit perfectly within the media capture rulebook pursued by illiberal regimes: such measures rely not on overt censorship but on subtle strategies to force critical voices out of the public discourse. In his influential Report on media capture, Marius Dragomir argued that capturing media regulatory authorities ensures that regulatory tools are enforced selectively in order to strengthen loyal outlets and undermine dissent. In this light, the Media Council’s decisions can be seen as sustained efforts to exclude the last independent political radio station from the public discourse. The European Commission echoed this concern, characterising the decisions as “highly questionable” and “disproportionate and discriminatory”, a view that the CJEU ultimately upheld.

The central role of media freedom in the Court’s analysis

While concerns relating to media freedom were the primary reason the case reached the EU’s political agenda, the legislative hook for the CJEU was the Electronic Communications Code (ECC) and its precursors. The ECC mandates that radio spectrum rights are allocated on the basis of objective, transparent, non-discriminatory, and proportionate criteria (Article 13(1)). In addition, the Commission argued that Media Council’s decisions infringed the EU Charter, in particular the right to freedom of expression (Article 11), which gave the CJEU an opportunity to expand on its media freedom case law.

The CJEU’s pre-existing jurisprudence on Article 11 of the EU Charter is piecemeal, to say the least. Because the Court can only perform a fundamental rights analysis in situations falling under the scope of EU law, and media law is in principle a matter of national competence, media-related questions only reach the Court indirectly. The CJEU tends to stress that a “fair balance” is to be struck between the right to freedom of expression and other EU Charter rights (see e.g. case C‑201/13, para 34), but it has historically rarely performed full-fledged media freedom analyses.

This is where the Klubrádió judgment pushes CJEU doctrine into new terrain. The Court foregrounded Article 11 of the EU Charter as a value in its own right, performing an independent media freedom analysis of the Hungarian Media Council’s decisions (paras 334-382). The starting point of its analysis is that radio plays a vital role “in shaping public opinion” and as such is a “fundamental channel for the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and information” (para 358). Referring to the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) well-established principle that freedom of expression applies not only to content but also to the means of information dissemination, the CJEU affirmed that spectrum allocation decisions have a “direct impact on the right to freedom of the media” (paras 359-360). Thus, while the EU regulatory framework is compatible with limitations on spectrum rights, these have to meet a strict necessity and proportionality test (para 369). In this sense, the CJEU in effect recognised that standards encapsulated in the EU’s telecom instruments, such as the transparent, proportionate, and non-discriminatory allocation of spectrum rights serve not only the competitive internal market in telecommunications services. They are also vehicles for a free and pluralistic media ecosystem upon which democratic societies depend (para 369). In doing so, the Court brought media freedom considerations from the peripheries to the centre.

The rejection of the formal legal compliance argument

The Court unequivocally rejected the argument put forward by Hungary and the Media Council that the contested decisions were merely the automatic legal consequences of the objective application of the authorisation scheme laid down in the Hungarian Law on Media Services. The law precludes the extension of a license contract in cases of repeated infringement, and Klubrádió technically committed more than one infringement. On this basis, Hungary argued that these decisions “cannot be equated with the closure of a media outlet” (para 348). This line of reasoning highlights the difficulties in countering media capture: because such measures leverage regulatory instruments and capacities, they can be framed as neutral legal actions, concealing their silencing effects.

The CJEU affirmed that “any national measure limiting or restricting broadcasters’ access to radio frequencies is liable to interfere with their right to freedom of the media”, even if such measures are grounded in national law (para 362). Subsequently, it assessed the seriousness of Klubrádió’s infringements, despite the fact that this is irrelevant under Hungarian law. The Court emphasised that the breaches in question were mere “clerical mistake[s]” and “minor inaccuracies of a formal nature” (paras 258, 380). Consequently, the Court found that revoking the radio station’s license “cannot reasonably be considered” either proportionate or necessary (paras 270, 374).

This reasoning sends an important signal in the context of captured media environments, where formal legality is often invoked to deflect scrutiny while the broader implications of regulatory decisions are swept under the rug. The Court saw through the absurdity of the Media Council’s reasoning and assessed its decisions in light of their effects, recognising them not as neutral administrative acts, but as interventions with far-reaching implications for media freedom.

A subtle shift to positive obligations

While the doctrine of positive obligations has a firm rooting in the case law of the ECtHR, the CJEU has rarely developed it in its media law jurisprudence. With the Klubrádió judgment, the CJEU began to test these waters by implicitly recognising that national legal frameworks should not only provide for a fair licensing framework on paper but also one that practically and effectively safeguards media freedom and pluralism.

Hungary repeatedly argued that since Klubrádió continues to operate as a radio channel available on the Internet, the Media Council’s decisions did not have the effect of silencing it (para 353). The CJEU rejected this reasoning and focused on the “reality of [the] interference” instead (para 364). The practical consequences of the revocation of Klubrádió’s license, including the loss of an established audience and proven business model, in themselves impact its right to media freedom (para 364). This implicit shift from considering whether Klubrádió’s speech is technically available to whether its freedom is practical and effective signals the CJEU’s growing attention to the positive dimension of media freedom. Its repeated emphasis on the principle of good administration reinforces this approach, highlighting that administrative frameworks have to be applied in a way that does not create unjustified barriers to media activities (para 207).

The Court did not limit itself to reviewing how the Media Council assessed the case, but it also scrutinised the design of the Hungarian legal framework itself. According to the Court, the law in its current form “is liable to lead to the adoption of decisions that are contrary to Article 11” (para 372). To avoid this, the Court found that “it ought to have been possible to rectify the irregularities” in Klubrádió’s renewal and tender applications, while minor errors “should not make it impossible for a radio station to pursue its activities” (paras 259, 380). In other words, the legal framework lacked sufficient flexibility and safeguards that would have enabled a more balanced proportionality assessment of Klubrádió’s infringements.

This reasoning resonates with the ECtHR’s established case law, for example the Centro Europa case, where the ECtHR held that “it is not sufficient to provide for the existence of several channels or the theoretical possibility for potential operators to access the audio-visual market” and that states carry “a positive obligation to put in place an appropriate legislative and administrative framework to guarantee effective pluralism” (paras 130, 134). Although the CJEU stopped short of explicitly framing its findings in terms of positive obligations, it imported much of the underlying logic.

A blueprint for enforcing media freedom

The Klubrádió judgment marks a subtle but important shift in the CJEU’s approach to media freedom. By placing freedom of expression and information under Article 11 of the EU Charter at the centre of its analysis, rejecting formalistic justifications for restrictive measures, and scrutinising the practical effectiveness of the national legal framework, the CJEU adopted a more holistic assessment of media freedom. It aligned itself more closely with the jurisprudence of the ECtHR, potentially strengthening the European enforcement of well-established freedom of expression standards. The adoption of the European Media Freedom Act will likely only reinforce this trajectory, providing further legal grounding for the CJEU to develop its media freedom case law.

As for Klubrádió itself, the judgment provides little immediate relief: it does not directly restore its frequency and Hungary has a track record of ignoring CJEU rulings anyway. Failure to align Hungarian media law with the Court’s judgment can lead to financial sanctions, but these mechanisms are slow and have yet to make a dent in Hungary’s illiberal regime. With national elections on the horizon, the most effective avenue for reforming the media ecosystem lies in the political sphere, while the EU’s increasing willingness to make use of its legal tools against media capture can helpfully complement any political transformation at the national level.

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James Fox 

Like most observers I listened to the oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara for signals about the possible vote alignment in the challenge to President Trump’s Executive Order declaring that birthright citizenship under the fourteenth amendment no longer applies to children whose parents are in the United States without authorization or long-term domicile. I left the argument thinking about how this quintessential originalist dispute in fact revealed the justices shifting around in a sea of rhetorical modalities, and how the scant efforts to attend to all the modalities inhibits argument and analysis.

As the case has been presented in the briefing, in the lower courts, and in much of the legal social mediasphere, it is almost entirely an originalism debate. The opponents of Trump’s Executive Order have a lot of text and ratifying history on their side, the leading precedent is largely originalist in character, the main supporters of the EO have developed long-winded originalist arguments on the fly and themselves are getting strong pushback for that effort by fellow conservative originalists as well as liberal scholars.

The oral arguments reflected a lot of this, of course. But I also thought they revealed important ways in which all the modalities (here thinking primarily of Philip Bobbitt’s modalities but not limited to them) were lurking in the background. Here are some thoughts on that reaction to the argument, with a focus mainly on the justices’ questions.

For the government Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the modern experience with unauthorized immigration reveals the necessity of interpreting the text to exclude children of undocumented parents from citizenship. Roberts shot it down with the above originalist-style quip.

But Roberts is not an originalist. Indeed, this quip borders on hilarity from the author of Shelby County v. Holder’s equal state sovereignty principle, which he used to override a congressional power that itself has deep originalist roots, to say nothing of the muscular presidential immunity he crafted in Trump v. United States, which exists nowhere is either text or contemporaneous historical meanings.

At bottom this is Roberts being a pluralist. Here the originalist ideal of a “fixed” constitution does the work he appears to want.  Roberts is artful in his pluralism, able to craft phrases to capture a point that distracts from questions of whether there is interpretive coherence in his jurisprudence. I suspect he also here is poking at Alito, who appeared to fully support Sauer’s evolving principles argument. 

Justice Alito’s Living Constitutionalism

Alito presented a transparently living constitutionalist defense of the government’s position.  Alito tossed Sauer a lifeline by making one of originalism’s common arguments to address the problem of text across time. The basic idea is that originalism always allows adaptation to new technologies, e.g. applying the fourth amendment to GPS signals or applying the second amendment to handguns (Alito actually used the less helpful analogy of theft statutes applying to microwaves). Alito tried to shoehorn into this evolving technologies idea some kind of “evolving laws” concept whereby the fact that federal law has changed over time to create new categories of approved and prohibited migration, or that the migration patterns themselves have changed, somehow analogizes to advances in technology. And while there may be intellectual value in seeing law as a technology, that’s not at all Alito’s point. Obviously this move gives away the game of originalism, since Alito is really saying that evolving social and political norms should carry strong interpretive weight as against historical and textual evidence. This is precisely what Alito and the Court rejected in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen where it mandated an absurdly low level of generality when considering legal and social changes to gun regulation over time (changes that themselves were tracking the very technological changes to firearms the Court so blithely accepts).

Ultimately, the evolving textual application Alito is going for here is just living constitutionalism done poorly (because not done openly). Similarly, Alito later hypothesized some version of a sleeper-cell, scary-alien enemy: would a child of an Iranian national be a birth citizen if he also had an obligation to serve in the Iranian military?  Again, not originalism but instead an odd kind of prudential bogyman argument. Notably he made no effort to distinguish interpretation and construction or fence off construction zones to do any of this work. 

Justice Kavanaugh and Section Five

Kavanaugh explicitly asked Sauer to comment on congressional powers under Section Five of the fourteenth amendment, and directed advocates to the 1952/1940 statute where congress, in detailing a broader range of paths to citizenship, parrots the fourteenth amendment’s birth citizenship clause. Before arguments I thought some justices might take this route to avoid the constitutional question and hold that the EO was beyond the president’s power under this statute, which, given its history, pretty clearly adopted the broad reading of birthright citizenship. But the way this played out I suspect the move instead may be to open a path for congressional power under Section Five to define the exceptions encompassed by the “subject to the jurisdiction” proviso.  This potentially connects Kavanaugh’s line of questioning with Justice Barrett’s. Any development of this more structural path would require significant engagement with this Court’s anemic view of congress’ Section Five power and with how it overlaps with the congressional powers over naturalization, so I am not sure how enthusiastic Kavanaugh was about this. But he was clearly thinking about it. 

Justice Barrett & the Exceptions

Barrett seemed very interested in trying to extract a principle from the three exceptions to birthright citizenship evident in the drafting history and in United States v. Wong Kim Ark: children of diplomats, children born in territory under foreign occupation, and children of Native Americans under tribal jurisdiction.  But why? When dealing with exceptions one need not find rules for them – the pertinent principles are derived from the main rule (here, citizenship by birthright) and exceptions can just be that – isolated exceptions (or as Roberts said, “quirky” and “idiosyncratic”).  You only really need a sub-principle connecting the exceptions if you want to open the possibility of applying the subprinciple to other situations, that is, if you want to make new exceptions. Perhaps she is thinking only of explaining why the administration’s proposed exceptions – children born to parents who are not legally present or are temporarily present – fail. But this would be a cumbersome way to say the government’s applications don’t fit long-established exceptions. When combined with her questions about congressional powers and with Kavanaugh’s similar questions, this may suggest a path to a holding that leaves open some room for congressional expansion and contraction of the exceptions under some unifying theory.

Justice Gorsuch: I am the expert on Indian law here, folks

Sauer absolutely had to know that since the exclusion of members of Native American tribes was one of the three recognized bases for the “subject to the jurisdiction” proviso, Gorsuch would have thoughts. He has repeatedly shown himself to be, at least in his own mind, the expert about and champion of Indian law on the Court. Yet when Gorsuch asked Sauer if his domiciliary theory of how the exceptions to birth citizenship can change over time meant that all Native Americans born within the international borders of the United States are citizens under the fourteenth amendment (as opposed to merely the 1924 statute), Sauer said he had not thought about the question.  Bad advocacy prep aside, what was Gorsuch’s point? Was it to show that Sauer’s theory of exception expansion makes no sense as original meaning? Or was it instead to suggest that congress exercised its Section Five power in the 1924 Act by contracting the exceptions, which might also mean congress has the power to expand them as well?  Or was Gorsuch hinting that the doctrinal history of Native exclusion Sauer relied on no longer holds? Gorsuch pressed this point with Cecillia Wang for the ACLU, who said the fourteenth amendment was best seen as a constitutional floor for citizenship that congress can expand.  I was not sure whether Gorsuch bought the floor idea or not. But Gorsuch’s self-conception as the Indian law justice will undoubtedly affect how he sees and analyzes the meaning of the clause and the proviso, likely pulling him away from Thomas’s inclination toward an anti-Dred-Scott-and-nothing-else interpretation.

Justice Thomas: Dred Scott and only Dred Scott

Thomas primed Sauer with a softball about Dred Scott, and said almost nothing else after that, so it is difficult to know where he stood. Perhaps his question was merely a way to help Sauer make an obvious point that the citizenship clause was significantly, if not primarily, about undoing Taney’s holding that Black people can never be United States citizens. And maybe Thomas did not realize Sauer would run so far with that ball as to cite the Mississippi Slave Code in support of his argument, thus apparently finding a way to side with the confederacy even while rejecting Dred Scott.  Ultimately Sauer’s argument – echoed in Trump’s claims – is that the Black citizenship purpose of the clause also limits the reach of the clause beyond that purpose. Thomas seemed inclined to this later when he asked a question expressing doubt that the framing of the amendment had anything to do with immigration.

This is fundamentally a reactionary view of the amendment, one which holds that it served only to secure basic rights for newly freed and free Black Americans and cannot be used to do anything else, a view wrapped in a slavery-only view of the Reconstruction amendments generally.  Thomas could easily lean into that view given his “Let him alone” misreading of Frederick Douglass. But he could also be persuaded by a somewhat broader view connected to at least some of the conservative originalists critics of the EO such as Keith Whittington and Michael Ramsey. It is hard to see him being willing to recognize citizenship protections for children of parents not lawfully present, but he also did not show an inclination toward Alito’s free-ranging originalism-only-in-name approach either. Thomas has shown no hesitancy in adopting questionable historical readings of the fourteenth amendment framing period, and I see no reason to think he won’t do so here.

Thomas also prompted Sauer to the argument that somehow the word reside – which comes at the end of the Citizenship Clause and refers to how someone who is a United States citizen by birth under the first part of the sentence also establishes their parallel but subordinate citizenship in a state.  Sauer pumped this up into an argument that “subject to the jurisdiction” inherently includes some long-term proof of residence and therefore domicile (a word appearing precisely nowhere in the text). Such a reading is grammatically and semantically bizarro. Perhaps Thomas is flirting with it, but I would be surprised to see it appear even in a dissenting opinion.  Sometimes textualist arguments are too tortured to even be tried. 

Liberal Wing – Don’t muddy the waters you drink from

My sense of how Justices Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor approached their questioning was they had a sense that enough of their colleagues supported the ACLU challenge that it was best not to stir things up too much. 

Jackson was all over Sauer’s claim that congress can set forth new exceptions – and in fact did so when it made immigration illegal for large groups of people starting in the 1870s and 1880s. I think she was the most bothered by the prospect of some sort of Section Five power to rewrite “subject to the jurisdiction” to basically swallow the “born . . . in” rule.  She reacted firmly against the suggestion that the framers and ratifiers would have meant this language to allow for that radical move.

Jackson also got after Sauer about the pragmatics of the EO. When she said “are we bringing pregnant women in for depositions?” she articulated in striking terms the prudential problems with the EO and the incredibly destabilizing costs it would impose. While Jackson is not at all hesitant to address fourteenth amendment original meanings, she seemed also to have little truck with any of Sauer’s more living constitutionalist gestures. 

Sotomayor presented the most doctrinal questioning, asking about more recent cases that suggest a long-standing assumption by the Court that the exceptions are narrow and the main principle broad (although she oddly stumbled on the timing and perhaps holding of a 19^th century Indian law precedent). It was striking how little this line of analysis arose. Depending on how broadly the Court decides to read Wong Kim Ark, these subsequent cases, along with the traditional practice of the federal government over that time, could foreclose even the slightest crack in the birthright rule proposed by Sauer. I look for this precedential mode to play more of a role in the eventual opinion, especially if authored by Roberts or Kagan.   

Kagan, revealing her own pluralist approach, emphasized with Sauer that several modalities – text, history, traditional practice, precedent – all point against his revisionist theory and so require much more persuasive evidence than he presents. I sensed she was trying to find common rhetorical ground with the Chief here. This also backed Sauer into the corner where he misrepresented a 1921 law review article in a failed effort to say the traditions and practices were not uniform. 

Another place where I thought Kagan was trying to work of a mind with Roberts was where they both pressed Wang on the many references to “domicile” in Wong Kim Ark. This is probably the biggest hurdle in countering Sauer’s argument, and both seemed interested in a good articulation of why domicile is not at the very least a limitation on Wong Kim Ark’s holding, if not itself an essential part of the holding (which Sauer claims). I am not sure they got that answer in oral argument. Justice Jackson stepped in to provide one by saying the Wong Kim Ark Court may have stressed the fact of the parents’ domicile to gain public acceptance of the opinion that was, by its holding, unusually generous toward an often-despised immigrant group. (Kagan and Roberts would do well to read John  Mikhail’s Balkinization post and linked work on the weakness of the domicile argument.) 

I mentioned at the top that I thought all of Bobbitt’s modalities were in play. The only one not really discussed, I think, was ethos, or the ethical social norms modality. It often happens that this “public values” modality operates sub rosa, present but unarticulated.  That seemed true here as well. Because of course the whole thing about the first sentence of the fourteenth amendment is its value-asserting preference for a radical birth equality. That’s what overturning Dred Scott was about. It’s what Reconstruction was about. It’s what the New Birth of Freedom and mass slave liberation was about. And, on the other side, the barely contained reason behind Alito’s dislike of the concept of birth citizenship and Trump’s open political justifications for effectively abandoning it are values-based norms of what it means to be an American, either conceived in a must-be-law-abiding sense or as a part of a darker vision of a Herrenvolk democracy. The problem is we have limited and ever-shrinking paths to articulating those reasons within constitutional law discourse. Yet these reasons are the basis of this conflict politically, and to the extent contested constitutional law is largely political law, they are at the heart here too.  That matters, because when the ACLU wins this case – as they will – an opinion that simply says “the text and history tell us so” speaks very differently than one that says “the text and history express some of our most cherished national values and here they are.”  While an originalist decision could have the potential to also speak in ethos, I fear it won’t, and we will be poorer for that. 

James Fox is a professor of law at Stetson University College of Law. He can be reached at fox@law.stetson.edu

     Without a DHS appropriation, most DHS employees, including those at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Coast Guard, have been working without pay.  TSA officers have been resigning and calling in sick, leading to huge lines at airports and numerous missed flights.  Other DHS employees have been seething in relative obscurity.  This post analyzes the legality, or lack thereof, of the actions President Trump has taken in response to this impasse. 

     When the previous temporary appropriation for DHS became unavailable on February 14, President Trump kept ICE agents working and continued to pay them with funds from section 100052 of OBBBA.  This section provides $29.85 billion to ICE for an extensive list of purposes including “Hiring and Training” and “Performance, Retention and Signing Bonuses”.  Although not a clean match with paying the regular salaries of on-going ICE employees, most people likely would regard that as sufficient authority for these payments.  Section 1000052 likely provided sufficient funds to support ICE for the remainder of this fiscal year.

     President Trump also kept CBP agents working and paid them under section 100051 of OBBBA.  Section 1000051 provides DHS $2.055 billion for several purposes including the “[h]iring and training of additional U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, and the necessary support staff, to carry out immigration enforcement activities.”  President Biden’s final budget proposal estimated that CBP would spend about $16 billion in a year so, even combined with 4.5 months of funding under continuing resolutions, section 1000051 funds alone likely would not suffice to fund CBP through the end of the fiscal year in September. 

     Finally, President Trump required many other DHS employees, including TSA officers and much of the Coast Guard, to continue working during the partial shutdown that began February 14.  This likely was appropriate under section 1342 of the Anti-Deficiency Act, which makes an exception to its general prohibition on the federal government accepting unpaid work where necessary to address “emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.”  He did not pay them, however, because section 1341 of the Act, which prohibits spending federal funds without a statutory appropriation, contains no “emergency” exception. 

     President Trump was unable to continue paying these non-ICE, non-CBP employees under sections 1000051 or 1000052 because the “Purpose Act” states “Appropriations shall be applied only to the objects for which the appropriations were made except as otherwise provided by law.”  

     The Government Accountability Office’s (GAO’s) Red Book of Appropriations Law, on which the Supreme Court has relied, characterizes the “Purpose Act”:  as “Simple, concise, and direct, Congress originally enacted this statute in 1809 and it is one of the cornerstones of congressional control over the federal purse.”  It quotes a 19^th Century Comptroller of the Treasury:  “It is difficult to see how a legislative prohibition could be expressed in stronger terms. The law is plain, and any disbursing officer disregards it at his peril.”  That “peril” is the Anti-Deficiency Act’s criminal penalties.  GAO notes that “[i]f a proposed use of funds is inconsistent with the statutory language, the expenditure is improper, even if it would result in substantial savings or other benefits to the government” and “transfer between appropriations is prohibited without specific statutory authority, even where reimbursement is contemplated.”

     As public irritation over long airport security lines mounted and Democrats continued to refuse to appropriate more no-strings money for ICE and CBP, President Trump repeatedly instructed congressional Republicans to reject Democratic bills that would have funded the rest of DHS and let ICE and CBP continue to spend OBBBA funds.  When Senate Republicans disobeyed and agreed to legislation that would do essentially that, House Speaker Mike Johnson prevented the Senate bill from coming up for a vote.  President Trump then ordered DHS to pay its workers notwithstanding the lack of an appropriation. 

     On March 27, President Trump issued a memorandum to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and DHS ordering them to pay TSA employees.  He stated that “[a]s President of the United States, I have determined that these circumstances constitute an emergency situation compromising the Nation’s security” but cited no statute making such a determination legally relevant.  In addition, he did not specify what appropriation, if any, should be drawn down to provide these payments.  Instead, he simply instructed OMB and DHS to make these payments “consistent with applicable law, including 31 U.S.C. 1301(a)”, the “Purpose Act”.  No available appropriation has a statutory purpose that would include paying TSA officers.  A week later he issued second a memorandum to OMB and DHS directing that “each and every employee of DHS” be paid.  This memorandum again contained an emergency declaration and a citation to the “Purpose Act” and again failed to specify any source of funds for the payments he was ordering. 

     With the Administration not advancing a theory of why this action might be legal, outside analysts have discussed section 90007 of OBBBA.  This section states:

In addition to amounts otherwise available, there are appropriated to the Secretary of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2025, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, $10,000,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2029, for reimbursement of costs incurred in undertaking activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to safeguard the borders of the United States.

These funds are clearly available for CBP agents at the nation’s perimeter.  One could plausibly argue that CBP officers at international airports are indirectly responsible for safeguarding our borders in that anyone to whom they refuse entry will quickly be sent back across those borders.  The Administration contends that ICE and CBP enforcement actions in the country’s interior somehow are part of border security; that position flies in the face of the ordinary usage of language and a long history of distinguishing between border and interior enforcement actions. 

     Even if one accepts the Administration’s unilateral reconceptualization of border enforcement, however, that at most helps fund CBP and the Coast Guard.  As the President’s own memo notes, TSA works only in “our domestic travel system”, not “to safeguard the borders of the United States.” 

     The President directs OMB and DHS “to use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations” for TSA pay and “to use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to the functions of DHS” to pay DHS employees.  This appears to reference the first of the three steps GAO applies to determine the propriety of an expenditure.  This step allows spending an appropriation only on activities necessary to accomplishing the statutory purpose of the appropriation.  That analysis is impossible, of course, without first establishing the appropriation’s purpose.  And for this, GAO cautions “The actual language of the appropriation act is always of paramount importance in determining the purpose of an appropriation.”  (The Supreme Court’s Textualists have nothing on the GAO.)

     The claim that paying DHS employees has “a reasonable and logical nexus” begs the question:  “to what?”  If the Administration had an appropriation whose purpose met this test, surely it would have disclosed it in the presidential memoranda or in response to questions thereafter.  Indeed, if the Administration thought paying DHS employees was permissible under existing law, surely it would have done so in February. 

     Moreover, even if the Administration could satisfy the first part of GAO’s three-part test, it likely would fail the third, which prohibits spending general appropriations on an activity Congress has addressed with a more specific appropriation.  “It is a well-settled rule that even where an expenditure may be reasonably related to a general appropriation, it may not be paid out of that appropriation where the expenditure falls specifically within the scope of another appropriation.”  Congress has addressed compensation for DHS employees in several specific appropriations, all of which barred spending funds after February 14.  The Administration could not lawfully evade that limitation even if it had a broader appropriation whose language plausibly permitted the expenditure. 

     This is not a case of necessity.  President Trump does not care for the terms of the deal Congress is offering.  He can certainly hold out in the hopes of getting something better.  But disregarding the Constitution to avoid bargaining with a coordinate branch of government is no more legitimate for him than it would have been for any of his many predecessors who disliked terms that Congress was offering.   

     President Trump is developing a habit of spending funds in defiance of the Appropriations Clause, the Anti-Deficiency Act, the Purpose Act, and other statutes.  His action to pay servicemembers during last fall’s partial government shutdown was wholly lawless.  His practice of keeping donations from affluent benefactors, and the proceeds from sales of Venezuelan oil he has seized, in accounts he controls outside the U.S. Treasury violates the Miscellaneous Receipts Act.  That Act requires funds to be promptly deposited in the Treasury – where they become subject to the Appropriations Clause. 

     This is important.  Although it may strike some as rather technical when compared with usurping Congress’s power to declare wars in a disastrous war of choice against Iran, Congress’s Power of the Purse is foundational to most other checks on presidential power.  The Court’s unwillingness to enforce various constitutional limitations on presidential power has been defended by arguing that Congress may defund actions of which it disapproves.  If the President may appropriate funds for whatever actions he desires without regard to statutory limits, that fallback constraint no longer exists.  Should Congress ever muster the will to cut off funding for President Trump’s war against Iran or other foreign adventures (Greenland?  Cuba?), we may expect that the President will simply declare a national emergency and order that funds continue to flow based on some wild “nexus” theory, perhaps again not even bothering to state which unrelated appropriation he chose to pilfer. 

     @DavidASuper.bsky.social @DavidASuper1

Elizabeth Beaumont

In this third and final post of the series, I argue that today’s constitutional stresses stem less from the “unbinding” Stephen Skowronek identifies than from a broader constellation of post-inclusion challenges—extreme polarization, economic inequality, technological disruption, and deliberate political choices that have strained democratic governance across many systems. Skowronek’s framework illuminates real challenges with the conflicts that can arise from democratization in a highly pluralist constitutional democracy, but it risks overstating the civil rights revolution as the primary cause while underestimating alternative sources of constitutional grounding. The history of civic constitutionalism suggests a different possibility than Skowronek’s bleak prognosis: a contentious yet regenerative process of civic struggle and consensus-building.

There is growing agreement among legal and political scholars that the U.S. is facing a serious constitutional crisis, with many contributing factors identified (see, e.g., Ackerman 2010, Mann and Ornstein 2012, Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Skowronek's analysis offers a different, older, and counterintuitive diagnosis rooted in American constitutional development: bounded resilience, serial adaptations that progressively loosened the constitutional framework, and the democratic breakthroughs of the civil rights revolution that ultimately "unbound" the Constitution from its earlier stabilizing exclusions (21-22). This provocative and important argument demands continued engagement. 

Yet as insightful and impressive as Skowronek’s account is, it functions less as a complete explanation than as one significant strand in a more complex and multicausal account. Reexamining the civil rights revolution shows that it produced a partially successful constitutional adaptation through the rise of a civil and social rights state, complete with new institutional mechanisms, auxiliaries, and meaningful (if incomplete) cross-racial consensus. Many contemporary dysfunctions stem from subsequent forces– economic inqualities and dislocation,  9/11 and its aftermath and deliberate expansions of executive power, the internet and digital revolution— that are not reducible to civil rights-era “unbinding” or fallouts. That a similar pattern of democratic conflicts and strain is visible across countries with markedly different constitutional structures and developmental trajectories suggests that bounded resilience is at most one dimension of a more complex and multicausal crisis (see, e.g., Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018, Nord et al 2025).

Structural Tensions and Post-Inclusion Stressors

The U.S. constitutional system contains deep tensions around democracy. At the time of its adoption, it was the most democratic in existence, in terms of its system of popular representation. Yet it was also designed with numerous undemocratic elements that prevented or created barriers to broad or equal democratic inclusion, representation, or influence over governance. Some of these problematic features have been nullified or transformed through pushes for greater inclusion – such as the three-fifths clause and the indirect election of senators – while others remain, contributing undemocratic and dysfunctional politics, such as the Electoral College, equal Senate representation, life tenure for Supreme Court justices, and the high bar for formal constitutional amendment (see, e.g. Dahl 2003, Levinson 2006). These structural features, combined with pathologies such as the campaign finance system, surely bear some responsiblity for current political dysfunctions, and should be widely debated as targets for constitutional reform.  Yet Americans are too often encouraged to view the founders’ Constitution as beyond critique or reform rather than to learn about and debate its “fault lines,” examine how important and transformative struggles for constitutional change have been for our past, or consider how civic mobilization could lead to constitutional reform in the present (see, e.g., Levinson  2020, Beaumont 2023).

Alternative Sources of Constitutional Grounding

Skowronek's portrayal of an “unbound” Constitution highlights the risk that full inclusion could strip away grounding for constitutional principles, leading to "mutually unacceptable futures" without shared interests. But this framing rests on a particular, and contestable, understanding of what constitutional grounding requires. Skowronek's conception of bounded resilience depends on a specific kind of grounding: social exclusions, structural constraints, and agreements about what lies beyond the reach of national governance. Historically, these groundings were unjust, as Skowronek acknowledges, but he sees them as functionally stabilizing. This assessment, however, may underestimate how such exclusions invited civic conflicts and constitutional challenges that ultimately destabilized earlier settlements. In U.S. history, maintaining exclusions and inequalities, such as those based on race, gender, class, or religion, may have provided some limited or temporary stabilization, but also often fueled conflict and destabilized constitutional orders, as seen in the lead-up to and outbreak of the Civil War, labor unrest, and civil rights struggles.

But constitutional systems can be grounded in other ways: through a shared appreciation of the trajectory of constitutional history, the accumulated meanings and practices forged through successive waves of civic vision and struggle, and the political and social landmarks that have emerged from those, ranging from pivotal amendments and statutes to evolving civic norms and public understandings of core principles.

Skowronek's portrayal of the Constitution as having become merely an "abstract matrix of possibilities" underestimates how the accumulated history of constitutional debate and democratic achievement provides concrete reference points for contemporary constitutional contests (122). The abolitionists' reinterpretation of equal protection, the suffragists' arguments about democratic inclusion, the civil rights movement's vision of equal citizenship are all constitutional resources that can help inform and ground contemporary debates. As Jack Balkin (2011) argues, each generation's constitutional struggles build on and respond to the accumulated meanings of prior generations rather than starting from scratch. Far from a void, this legacy, built through successive civic struggles, social movements, political leadership, and institutional innovations, offers resources for grounding constitutional principles in broader and more democratically legitimate terms (Beaumont 2014).

Civic Constitutionalism as a Regenerative Path

The question the adaptability paradox ultimately presents, then, is not whether constitutional grounding is possible in a fully inclusive polity, but what type of grounding is possible and through what processes it may be forged. One crucial mechanism for regrounding is civic constitutionalism– the ongoing work of civic actors and social movements in reframing constitutional principles, building new coalitions, and forging new constitutional common sense.

A deep concern with Skowronek’s framework of bounded resilience and an adaptability paradox, coming to a head with the civil rights revolution, is its implication that the American system of constitutional democracy cannot successfully move beyond its roots in a highly exclusionary political order. In contrast, participants in civic struggles, from Anti-Federalists to white working men and laborers, from abolitionists, freedmen, and suffragists to feminists and LGBTQ+ activists, have insisted that these changes were not only possible, but necessary to realize the system’s own principles of popular sovereignty, equal citizenship, and justice (Balkin 2011; Beaumont 2014).

The current dysfunctions of the American constitutional system no longer include legalized social exclusions, but they do include persistent democratic inequalities structural problems and multiple post-inclusion stressors: extreme partisan polarization and intensification of zero-sum conflict; rising economic disparity and insecurity that fuel resentment and populist mobilization; the expansion of executive power and presidentialization of politics (accelerated after 9/11 and further entrenched in subsequent administrations); and the distorting effects of structural features such as gerrymandering, the Senate’s malapportionment, the Electoral College, and an increasingly politicized judiciary. While these problems have been intensified by the constitutional changes and social conflicts that followed the civil rights revolution, as Skowronek's framework pushes us to recognize, they are not reducible to that “unbinding.” They also reflect ongoing institutional tensions, technological and economic transformations, and deliberate political choices that have strained constitutional democracy in the U.S., and in many other countries.

…..

Skowronek suggests a tragic dilemma at the heart of American constitutionalism: if constitutional resilience and stability have depended on maintaining some social exclusions, and if sweeping democratic inclusion prevents stable adaptation, then we appear caught between two incompatible goals: a fully inclusive democracy, or a constitutionally stable one. Which do we prioritize? Or, how can we make our way toward having both? Skowronek’s prognosis is bleak, offering “little reassuring to cling to” (3). He warns that while “the priority of democracy has become unassailable,” if “American democracy has become nothing more than a cold civil war, and the Constitution is but a conduit for contestation, the future looks rocky indeed”(116). Yet history points toward a different possibility. The very civic actors and social movements that have repeatedly sought to refound the constitutional order, even  though it seemed impossible to change, suggest a path forward: a continued contentious yet regenerative process of civic struggle and consensus-building. Both are needed to align the Constitution with the more expansive democracy we have become– and the one we might yet come to be (Beaumont 2014). The question is whether we can summon sufficient civic energy and effective leadership to meet the current dysfunctions.

Elizabeth Beaumont is Associate Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. You can reach her at beaumont@ucsc.edu. 

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But there's a third possibility. Perhaps prosecutors are deliberately making a weak presentation. Think about that for a second. Say you're told to seek an indictment in a case that is weak or unjustified. One option, given that grand jury proceedings are secret, is to just go into the room and try to lose. Then you can come out and tell your superior: "Look, I tried to get the indictment that you wanted, but the grand jury refused." Unlike NBA teams that tank, no one will ever know the truth.

Elizabeth Beaumont

My first post outlined Stephen Skowronek’s adaptability paradox and his sobering claim that the civil rights revolution ruptured the Constitution’s bounded resilience. On his telling, broad inclusion dissolved the social exclusions that once enabled stable constitutional reorderings, leaving power and authority reconfigured in ways that magnified rather than managed conflict.

Here I undertake a reassessment of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s–70s. I argue that it can be seen as a partially successful adaptation, producing new institutional mechanisms and “auxiliaries” in the form of a “civil and social rights state,” alongside meaningful if contested cross-racial consensus on commitments to political inclusion and equality. Landmark statutes, Great Society social programs, administrative enforcement, litigation and judicial decisions, and civic mobilization contributed to significant, if incomplete, reordering. 

For Skowronek, the civil rights revolution marks the culmination of the adaptability paradox, and the point at which the constitutional system's bounded resilience was dissolved by broad democratization. As the body of "We the People" expanded toward broad inclusivity, encompassing not only white men, but African Americans, women, Indigenous peoples, racial and religious minorities, disabled people, LGBTQ+, and others, the U.S. constitutional system, on his account, lost its capacity for regeneration and spiralled into dysfunction. Although he wholeheartedly supports the civil rights revolution’s goals of inclusion and equality, Skowronek’s analysis of its political and constitutional consequences is almost entirely negative, seeing them as the root causes of destabilization. It can be easy to adopt a purely celebratory or uncritical stance toward the civil rights revolution, but Skowronek’s evaluation overcorrects in the other direction – underestimating the achievements and institutional innovations, overlooking the partial consensus achieved, and placing too much blame on the civil rights era for the current crisis. Reconsidering this history suggests a mixed picture, one that included many of the elements Skowronek associates with successful constitutional adaptation through the party state and administrative state.

The Adaptability Paradox suggests three criteria for successful adaptation other than maintenance of social exclusions: new institutional mechanisms and arrangements (auxiliaries), constitutional common sense (minimum consensus), and connection to constitutional essentials (credible claims of fidelity).  Skowronek posits that past reorderings leading to the party state and administrative state achieved these, while the civil rights revolution failed (3, 10). I argue instead that the civil rights revolution partially met each of these criteria, and gave rise to a partly successful adaptation through a new “civil and social rights state” that garnered important, if contested and incomplete, political consensus and that "pay[ed] homage to the original" by grounding transformative demands in the Constitution's own text and principles, invoking equal protection, due process, the Commerce Clause, and the Reconstruction Amendments (17-18). Although the rise of civil and social rights in the 1960s and 70s (and the new apparatuses for implementing and enforcing them) are often treated as distinct innovations, we can also see that their parallel initiation was not coincidental (see, e.g., Bok 1992). Rather, it involved intentional institutional responses to the civil rights revolution’s challenges to racial inequality, economic disparity, and extensive poverty in the U.S., an adaptation process in which Congress, President Johnson, key administrative agencies, and federal courts all played roles.

The most famous political dimension of this was a series of landmark civil rights statutes, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination, protected voting rights, and created both new enforcement and incentive mechanisms, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, created a nondiscrimination requirement that automatically applied to all federally funded programs. This legislation contributed to new executive agencies and offices to enforce these rights (such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, and a network of federal agencies charged with implementing and enforcing new civil rights requirements across the federal system) (see, e.g. Graham 1990).

But a second, overlapping dimension of this adaptation of governing arrangements and relations involved creating “Great Society” social programs. President Johnson and Congress designed these programs to address poverty and inequality more broadly, but also included strategic tools for implementing civil rights through mechanisms of federal “carrots and sticks” over state and local entities. Medicare, the first nationalized health insurance (but limited to older Americans), created requirements for medical providers to comply with civil rights legislation, making it a civil rights vehicle as well (Reynolds 1997; Smith 2005). A series of new education laws and programs, too, responded to the civil rights movement by including intentional synergies for enforcing civil rights across K-16 schools, including significant new funding for K-12 schools and universities, and the launch of free preschool and a school breakfast program, all requiring recipient schools to adhere to civil rights requirements (Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Project Head Start (1964), and the Child Nutrition Act (1966)) (Beaumont  2015, 974-975, Superfine 2013, Cross 2004).

We can see how the deliberate pairing and intertwining of civil rights enforcement with universally available social programs and new federal funding for local education and communities was itself an innovative constitutional strategy. It encouraged cross-racial buy-in and what Smith and King (2014) have termed “racial policy alliances” to support the new constitutional order (see also Brown 1999, Quadagno 1994)  Extending new benefits — Medicare, education funding, food assistance — to Americans of all races and classes while simultaneously using many of these benefits to leverage civil rights compliance and integrate segments of American life, helped construct a constitutional coalition that commanded broad popular support across racial lines and for a time across partisan ones.

The emerging civil and social rights state also involved a greatly expanded role for the judicial branch and courts. Landmark Warren Court decisions, epitomized by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), began reinterpreting equal protection and other constitutional principles in line with arguments advanced by civil rights movements at a time when African Americans were widely prevented from voting. Even after the Voting Rights Act improved formal access to the ballot, because African Americans were a political minority, and the Supreme Court and federal courts were sometimes more receptive than legislatures. This use of judicial independence encouraged sustained litigation campaigns, and inspired similar legal strategies by women and other historically excluded and minority groups (Epp 1998, Anderson 2006, Mayeri 2011).  

While Supreme Court decisions receive far more attention, it may have been still more consequential that the political implementation of civil rights created private rights of action as a new, “decentralized” enforcement instrument. As Sean Farhang (2010) suggests, this innovation helped produce what could be termed a “litigation state” operating within or alongside the civil and social rights state. Farhang demonstrates that Congress deliberately included private litigation in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and in much civil and social rights legislation that followed) largely because it did not trust the President or administrative agencies to enforce these laws. This institutional innovation and its growth was in keeping with anti-statism and reluctance to further expand national bureaucracy, and it addressed some major failures of the New Deal settlements and the administrative state regarding racial inequality.  It was also incentivized by inherited constitutional structures of federalism, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary. Shifting these features allowed Congress to enable protection for many rights – from prohibitions on racial discrimination in schools to sex discrimination in workplaces to rights to medicare or clean air – allowing new ways for rights to “work” by providing tools for litigation and legal mobilization that could be used in any community without depending on the executive branch or states (Burke 2002, see also Epp 1998, McCann 1994, Kagan 2001).

It is common now to criticize the problems with “the litigious state” and recognize the many limits of the civil and social rights state (just as there are many criticisms of problems with the earlier party state and administrative state Skowronek holds up as success stories)(see, e.g. Rosenberg 1991, Fiorina 2009). Skowronek deepens the critiques by faulting the judicial and legal adaptations as sources of “judicial supremacy” and “adversarial legalism” that helped unbind the Constitution (125-134, 166). However, incorporating these mechanisms into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and much subsequent rights legislation can be viewed as pragmatic, if not necessary, extra-constitutional innovations for a fragmented democracy. Without private enforcement mechanisms, civil rights protections likely would have remained largely unenforceable promises, subject to changes in presidential support, shifting administrative priorities, and resistance from state and local governments. As Farhang (2010) shows, the judicialization of civil rights enforcement was a deliberate and “functional” institutional choice in a fragmented political system – an extra-constitutional innovation that gave civil rights enforcement a durable foundation independent of shifting executive priorities. In Skowronek’s own terms, this can be understood as a partially successful constitutional auxiliary.

We can also see that the new civil and social rights state incorporated important consensus-building, stabilizing, and constraining elements aimed to foster cross-racial consensus and constrain the scope of conflict. The reordering and its new legislation and government programs were framed around principles of equal opportunity, but emphasized ideas of “color-blind equal opportunity” and “democratic opportunity,” rather than race-specific repair (Smith and King 2024). This approach encouraged cross-racial buy-in, while also providing a limiting principle that helped contain the most expansive demands for social repair and redistribution, thereby enabling a broader political coalition for the new constitutional order. These consensus-building elements help explain the substantial public support for important elements of the civil and social rights state that polling data suggests long continued.

The civil rights and social rights reconfiguration also achieved significant areas of political consensus that Skowronek does not acknowledge. For instance, after advocating and winning passage of the Civil Rights Act and running on a Great Society platform emphasizing some of the civil and social rights championed by the Civil Rights Movement, President Johnson was elected over Goldwater with 60% of the popular vote and 90% of the electoral vote, victories comparable to Roosevelt's landslides of 1932 and 1936. And national surveys indicated substantial, albeit uneven, public support for key elements of the new civil and social rights state. For the sweeping 1964 Civil Rights Act, October 1964 Gallup polls indicated 58% approval (31% disapproval); the 1965 Voting Rights Act had 76% favor in April 1965 (see Gallup Organization, 2020). Skowronek suggests a ‘precipitous collapse’ of Johnson’s consensus, but both in terms of subsequent civil rights legislation – often passed with some bi-partisan support – and in terms of subsequent public opinion surveys, some areas of consensus were sustained (139). For instance, in 2014, 80% of respondents viewed the Voting Rights Act as 'mostly good' for the country (Pew Research Center). And white opposition to segregation plummeted from around 66% in the 1960s to 4% in the 1980s (Smith and  Sheatsley, 1984). As recently as 2008, majorities of whites and Blacks said the civil rights movement still impacts society positively (Pew Research Center). While significant divisions persisted on many issues, there are indications of some increase in public buy-in and at least minimal consensus for key issues and principles at stake in the civil and social rights reordering, including racial equality, voting rights, equal protection, and desegregation.

Enduring public support for many Great Society programs across partisan lines also suggests the civil rights and social rights reordering achieved a significant degree of consensus in the general population. Despite polarization on many issues, Medicare enjoys the support of roughly 80-84% of Americans, including large majorities of Republicans (KFF; NAMI/Ipsos 2025); SNAP is viewed favorably by 64-78% of Americans across party lines (FMI 2025; Data for Progress 2025); Head Start commands the support of 72% of voters across the political spectrum, including bipartisan support in Congress (UpONE Insights/FFYF 2025); and free school breakfast and lunch programs are supported by 63-74% of voters, including majorities of Republicans (FRAC 2021; Data for Progress 2021).

To be sure, the adaptations to the civil rights revolution had mixed outcomes, positive and negative, intended and unintended. New legislation and mechanisms for civil rights did help empower marginalized groups and provided new avenues for enforcement, but they also further increased national power, sparking debates over federalism and judicial power.  Indeed, the significant limitations of the civil and social rights state are often critiqued by those who believe much more should have been done to address slavery and the social and economic harms that national, state, and colonial-era government had committed or legally sanctioned against African American since the 17th century (see, e.g. Bell 1992, Carbado and Gulati 2013, Darity and Mullen 2020).  From the perspective of many African-Americans and other critics, the adaptations to the civil rights revolution have functioned very effectively to “stabilize” the limits of the civil and social rights state and exclude controversial issues related to race, slavery, poverty, and economic inequality.  But Skowronek treats civil rights as a failed adaptation, even as the two successful adapations to democratic inclusion he identifies– the party state and the administrative state – could also be seen from the reverse perspective, as having contributed to distortions with the functioning of constitutional democracy, some of which persist into the present. Here, we might think of some parallels in unintended outcomes: the New Deal's administrative expansion generated the anti-statist and anti-regulatory critiques that fueled the conservative movement of the 1970s and 1980s; the civil rights revolution's expansion of rights and judicial enforcement generated critiques of adversarial legalism and judicial overreaching and contributed to the rise of the contemporary conservative movement. In both cases, backlash can be seen as a predictable political response to transformative constitutional change rather than evidence of failed adaptation.

We can also think of some of the limitations of the party state as a stabilizer, and its problematic outcomes for constitutional democracy. Skowronek credits it with managing incorporation of white male suffrage and stabilizing a new constitutional order, but the party state ultimately failed to prevent the slide into the Civil War within two decades of its emergence. This adaptation also gave rise to institutional arrangements with problematic consequences, including the rise of primaries and gerrymandering. The primary system, for instance, was not only long used to exclude some from voting, particularly African Americans and other minorities, but its later expansions contributed to polarization because primaries tend to empower the most extreme and motivated partisans (Fiorina 2009). Party leaders in state legislatures have long used their power to gerrymander to create “safe” seats, but the growth of this capacity alongside the party state has increasingly allowed parties and politicians to ‘choose their voters,’ rather than voters choosing representatives, distorting legislative ideology and reducing responsiveness (Stephanopoulos 2017). The development of these features of the party state, originally designed to manage the inclusion of white male suffrage while suppressing divisive issues like slavery, illustrate how “successful” adaptations can also embed structural distortions that continue to undermine democratic accountability and responsiveness into the present. Thus, while Skowronek paints a sharp contrast between Civil Rights Era constitutional outcomes and the Progressive and New Deal era political settlements, it seems more plausible to see all of these struggles and settlements as leading to partial consensus and incremental buy-in, subject to ongoing divisions and backlashes.

Another significant limitation of Skowronek’s assessment of the civil rights revolution comes from his top-down, state-centered approach. This perspective does not recognize the role of civic groups and social movements for pushing for particular areas of follow-through, nor does it consider how efforts to implement a new constitutional order inevitably face push back, reactive backlash, and often protracted tug-of-war involving opposing civic forces, political elites, and parties. A closer look at the civil rights era groups and movements suggests that Skowronek overlooks the degree to which they not only pushed for constitutional rights, but actively worked to gain wider acceptance and segments of support for commitments to inclusion and equality.

Civic reformers have repeatedly served as “civic founders” or “co-founders” of constitutional transformations, not merely applying pressure from outside the system but also actively remaking constitutional meanings through sustained civic mobilization (Beaumont 2014). They developed and advocated new understandings of popular self-governance, rights, and citizenship that eventually reshaped the constitutional order, and, in the process they developed new civic associations and social relations (Beaumont 2014). The civil rights, feminist, and LGBT rights movements of the 1950s through the 1980s followed this general pattern. Each movement invoked existing constitutional principles (equal protection, due process, the guarantees of republican government) and strategically redeployed them to advance new claims. Each also created new civic organizations, including legal advocacy groups and “support structures” that undertook organized litigation campaigns (the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU Women's Rights Project, LGBT legal advocacy organizations) contributing to a civic infrastructure that helped build new constitutional meanings and rights from below (Epp 1998, Beaumont 2014, Mayeri 2011, Andersen 2006, Francis 2014).

Crucially, these movements did not simply assert constitutional claims. They also worked strategically to build broader political and social consensus around those claims, seeking to bring along not just movement activists but legal elites, legislators, sympathetic publics, and eventually significant portions of both political parties. Scholars have shown how the movements of the civil rights revolution worked strategically to build consensus around racial equality. Mary Dudziak (2000), for example, demonstrates that the civil rights movement strategically connected its goals to American democratic ideals and Cold War imperatives, building a broader consensus for reform that extended beyond the movement. Additionally, the NAACP's decades-long campaign against lynching and mob violence, documented by Megan Ming Francis (2014), shows how civic organizations built consensus through sustained public advocacy, legislative lobbying, and litigation long before the landmark legislation of the 1960s. Likewise, Serena Mayeri (2011) shows how the feminist movement strategically built on civil rights precedents to develop a new constitutional consensus around sex equality, explicitly connecting gender and race discrimination claims to broaden their coalition and constitutional legitimacy. In Skowronek’s own terms, such civic mechanisms – reframing constitutional principles, building coalitions, creating new civic and legal organizations, and connecting rights claims to broadly shared values– can be understood as important “auxiliaries” that helped carry constitutional reordering forward by fostering broader consensus and supporting implementation amid backlash.

None of this is to say that the civil rights revolution achieved either the full aims of the movements that energized it or conditions of full constitutional consensus and stability.  It has not, and disagreements over the civil and social rights state’s commitments to inclusion and equality have clearly contributed to the conflicts of the present era. Yet attributing the current political morass primarily to failed adaptation following the civil rights revolution overreaches in at least two important respects.

First, as we have seen, Skowronek’s account overlooks the pragmatic innovations and partial successes of the civil and social rights state and the partial consensus it was able to garner around core commitments to political inclusion, equal protection, as well as some social welfare rights (particularly Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, school breakfast and lunch). 

Second, Skowronek’s emphasis on the civil rights revolution’s ruptures to past settlements and incomplete adaptation as the root cause of present political and constitutional problems leaves much overlooked. It largely discounts the role of many subsequent forces and deliberate political choices that operated largely independently of the 1960’s-70’s constitutional legacies and are not reducible to bounded resilience — from 9/11 and its aftermath, to the internet and digital revolution, to rising economic dislocation and inequality. For instance, Skowronek attributes both judicialization and presidentialization of constitutional politics to systemic disruptions and loss of adaptive capacity following the civil rights revolution (203).  But there is persuasive evidence that the greatest expansion of modern Presidential power did  not emerge from or build directly on the civil rights revolution’s adaptations – which had helped to significantly expand civil liberties as well as equal protection. Rather, it burst forward after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, with President George W. Bush and his administration deliberately acting to increase presidential power and remove post-Watergate constraints, with subsequent presidents building on this new opportunity (Savage 2007, Goldsmith 2007).  This significant reshaping of separation of powers reflected the operation of forces and political choices not satisfactorily explained as mere downstream effects of 1960s-70s “constitutional unbinding.”

Thus, while the civil rights revolution undeniably transformed prior arrangements of governmental power and prior constitutional settlements and contributed to contemporary stresses, a more complete account must recognize subsequent developments as significant drivers in their own right. In the final post, I examine the multicausal post-inclusion stressors we face today and argue that civic constitutionalism offers a path toward renewed grounding in a broadly inclusive polity.

Elizabeth Beaumont is Associate Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. You can reach her at beaumont@ucsc.edu.

“Will we women have the strength necessary to do away with the traditional Mexican concept of a democracy without women?”¹⁾

What sounds like an oxymoron today was the very real question women all around the world had to face in the 20th century. Fortunately, the answer to this question posed by Amalia González Caballero de Castillo Ledón would eventually be affirmative – after 24 years of struggle to obtain women’s suffrage. However, the mark she left extends far beyond Mexican or even Latin American history and reaches into the very foundation of our legal understanding today, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Fototeca Amalia González Caballero. Acervo Histórico Diplomático. Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores. México. A 3/1 S.84 Ej. 5.

The early years

Amalia was born in Santander de Jiménez, Tamaulipas, Mexico, on 18 August 1898.²⁾ Her widowed mother moved the family of two to Ciudad Victoria, where she formed a close friendship with Adela Gil, the mother of Emilio Portes Gil – a tie that would later accelerate Amalia’s political career when he became president of Mexico in 1928.³⁾

From a young age, she was passionate about music, theatre and poetry and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the National University of Mexico.⁴⁾ In 1920, Amalia married the historian Luis Castillo Ledón, with whom she had three children.⁵⁾

Laying the foundations

Amalia started her career as a secretary to President Portes Gil’s wife and was soon offered a position in cultural promotion where she founded the Teatro de Masas. It was unusual for young wives to work in a position that required them to spend so much time outside the home, and she was only able to pursue her profession because other women in her family helped with the housework that was expected of her.⁶⁾

The groundwork for her diplomatic career was laid in 1935, when Amalia carried out a delicate mission as a representative of the Mexican government in Texas in which she succeeded to resolve a long-standing conflict between the state of Texas and the Mexican consul.⁷⁾ Having proven her diplomatic talent, she was appointed Mexico’s representative to the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) four years later.⁸⁾ It was in this environment that Amalia first met and formed friendships with other prominent Latin American feminists, such as Minerva Bernadino, whose allyship helped her push for change through their combined forces.

In the 1930s, Amalia founded the Ateneo Mexicano de Mujeres as well as the Club Internacional de Mujeres to strengthen mutual support among women from different fields and generations in Mexico.⁹⁾

The Declaration of Human Rights and the Commission on the Status of Women

Amalia was sent as a delegate to the Chapultepec and San Francisco Conferences, which led to the creation of the United Nations and enabled her to play an active role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¹⁰⁾ Unlike other female delegates, she felt that she represented the women of the world and fought for the explicit recognition of women as subjects of human rights, whereas others showed up as “delegates” first and “women” second and saw no reason to differentiate between men and women.¹¹⁾

Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, opposed the explicit inclusion of women’s rights, asserting that women were already included in the terms “human rights” and “rights of men”. Amalia, on the other hand, sought to ensure that the word “women” was included as often as possible.¹²⁾

During the drafting of the Declaration, Amalia was a member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women and was elected vice president of the Commission in 1948.¹³⁾ Alongside women such as Bertha Lutz, Minerva Bernardino, Isabel Pinto Vidal, Jessie Street, and Hansa Mehta, she succeeded in changing the wording of Article 1 of the Declaration from “all men are born free and equal in dignity and rights” to “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. The expansion of the wording in Article 16 was particularly close to Amalia’s heart, given the difficulties faced by illegitimate children and women seeking maternity support. By renouncing “marriage” in the definition of family, the wider definition included otherwise marginalized communities.¹⁴⁾

UN Photo by Kari Berggrav

Minerva Bernardino, Dr. Ophelia Mendoza and Amalia González de Castillo Ledón at the Opening of the Second Session on the Status of Women

The concept of state feminism and women’s suffrage

Amalia saw a need for formal rights as a prerequisite for achieving political equality. She envisioned the presence of women in all government offices and planned to achieve this through systematic action. Her so-called state feminism included calls for the creation of a Department of Women (a cross-cutting federal government agency) or for a minimum quota ensuring women’s inclusion during the renewal of city councils.¹⁵⁾

The very basis for true political equality lay in securing women’s suffrage, which Amalia aimed to establish at all three levels of the Mexican government: federal, state and municipal. It took her and the other Mexican suffragettes 24 years and an extensive signature drive to finally achieve the constitutional reform that established universal suffrage in Mexico in 1953.¹⁶⁾ Ironically, the reasoning for the denial of this full citizenship was the fear of post-revolutionary Mexican elites that women would take a stance that was too conservative for their liking, while from today’s perspective, being one of the last countries in Latin America to establish women’s suffrage would be deemed even more conversative.¹⁷⁾

Shaping policy and representation

The same year that women’s suffrage was achieved, Amalia’s public work also proved fruitful on a personal level when she was appointed extraordinary envoy to Sweden and Finland simultaneously. Only three years later, in 1956, Amalia was promoted to the rank of ambassador – becoming the first woman in Mexico to hold that title as well as the fourth female ambassador worldwide. In 1957, she was appointed ambassador to Switzerland. She excelled in the then male-dominated sphere and retired from her final posting as ambassador to Austria in 1970, aged 72.¹⁸⁾

Following her successful endeavors on the international stage, Amalia became the first woman in Mexico to hold a position in a presidential cabinet when President Adolfo López Mateos appointed her as the Undersecretary of Cultural Affairs at the Ministry of Public Education in 1958.¹⁹⁾

Amalia’s legacy

Throughout her life, Amalia remained true to her roots and expressed herself creatively by writing plays and publishing poetry alongside her political work and activism. She died in Mexico City on 3 June 1986 aged 87. Throughout her life, she was a trailblazer for women in Mexico and beyond – serving as a role model for women by entering fields long dominated by men. She also left a lasting legacy through her leadership in the establishment of women’s suffrage in Mexico, and through her contributions to making the Universal Declaration of Human Rights more inclusive for women and children.²⁰⁾

Further readings:

• “Amalia González Caballero de Castillo Ledón: entre las letras, el poder y la diplomacia” by Gabriela Cano and Patricia Vega, Gobierno del Estado de Tamaulipas, Secretaría de Cultura, Instituto Tamaulipeco para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico 2016.
• “Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement” by Katherine M. Marino, University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
• “El disciplinamiento de los cuerpos en Cubos de noria, de Amalia de Castillo Ledón: la estrategia política de la Revolución mexicana” by Edith María Alberta Ibarra Araujo, pp. 65 ff. in “La política en el Teatro y el Teatro en la polítcia”, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City 2023.

The post Amalia González Caballero de Castillo Ledón appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Elizabeth Beaumont

When Stephen Skowronek argues that the civil rights revolution “unbound” the U.S. Constitution, he posits a troubling paradox: America’s greatest democratic achievement—the sweeping inclusion of the 1960s and 1970s—may have ended the system’s adaptive capacity.  But does this diagnosis adequately capture what happened after the 1960s? In this first post of a three-part series, I engage Skowronek’s sophisticated historical-structural analysis while highlighting important dimensions his framework underestimates or overlooks. The civil rights revolution, I will argue in the next post, produced a partially successful constitutional adaptation—one that generated new institutional mechanisms and meaningful (if incomplete) cross-racial consensus. Current dysfunctions stem less from “unbinding” than from a complex set of post-inclusion stressors. Constitutional grounding, moreover, can emerge from the accumulated meanings forged through successive civic struggles rather than old exclusions.

Since the framing of the U.S. Constitution, waves of reformers– from Anti-Federalists, to free African Americans and anti-slavery activists, to suffragists, labor activists, progressives, and civil rights activists– have challenged undemocratic features of the system and pushed for inclusion and transformative change. Their ideas and struggles have reshaped the political community and launched constitutional reconstructions (see, e.g. Ackerman 1991, Ritter 2006, Balkin 2011, Beaumont 2014). In his thought-provoking new book, Stephen Skowronek turns our focus to crucial questions of how, and whether, such reorderings were politically implemented. Were their goals carried forward through stabilizing adaptations that anchored a new consensus, or were they obstructed, redirected, and left unfulfilled? Skowronek draws unsettling conclusions from his analysis of four historical eras of constitutional development. His most sobering contention is that the resilience of the U.S. Constitution is not only limited, but may be inseparable from its injustices: earlier adaptations had been made possible by the very exclusions that prevented full democratic citizenship for African Americans, women, and others, by limiting the field of competing interests enough to enable minimum consensus.  On this account, although the civil rights revolution of the 1960s-70s brought broad inclusiveness to American democracy, it could not generate a successful constitutional adaptation. Instead, he argues, the Constitution became “unbound,” loosened from its founding structure and pulled back and forth in divisive conflicts, eventually producing the present era of polarization, democratic backsliding, and constitutional dysfunction. In this telling, the greatest achievement of American democracy – the sweeping democratic expansion of the latter 20th century – may have ended the constitutional system’s capacity for successful reordering, with no clear way forward. 

By drawing on his far-ranging expertise in American politics and taking a systems-level approach, Skowronek offers a sophisticated account of broad patterns of constitutional change, boldly reconceptualizing the development of constitutional democracy in the U.S. This includes potent arguments regarding how new institutional mechanisms and “auxiliaries” may help constitutional adaptations succeed by reorganizing governance and managing conflict. His framework also provides a further, and powerful, challenge to originalist accounts of the constitutional order. Yet his understanding of “bounded resilience” and the criteria for judging the success or failure of a constitutional adaptation raise questions.

Skowronek’s Theoretical Framework: Adaptation, Consensus, and Bounded Resilience

The U.S celebrates having “the oldest continuously operating constitution in the world,” but as Skowronek shows, this nearly 240-year record has been enabled through a series of significant transformations and “remodeling projects”(2,6). And, just as the initial U.S. Constitution was not self-executing and required political action to carry it out, so, too, do transformative constitutional changes require political follow-through (95). 

Standing at the core of the book is Skowronek’s theoretical framework and historical tracing of how constitutional transformations or reorderings – reconfigurations of power, authority, and social relationships - can be politically implemented or impeded. His analysis hinges on inferences about serial adaptation and a trio of linked concepts and conditions: reordering adaptation, (re)creation of constitutional consensus, and bounded resilience. Constitutional adaptation is a combination of continuity and change, a type of constrained, “resetting,” “steadying,” stabilizing change to governing arrangements and relations that takes place over decades (9). To carry out a reordering adaptation, political institutions need to create new policies and extra-constitutional “auxiliary” arrangements while retaining many features of the existing system and a connection to the “essential characteristics” of the initial Constitution’s principles and structure (6, 10-16).  These adaptations also depend on constitutional consensus, the idea that some minimal agreement or shared “common sense” about constitutional essentials is necessary for governing and stability. When political institutions work to implement a reordering through a synthesis of innovations, older institutional elements, and links to the initial Constitution’s principles and framework, this helps recreate a constitutional consensus around a new order. 

But Skowronek believes the U.S. Constitution does not have unlimited adaptability; it has “bounded resilience.”  In his conception, the system is intranscendably bounded politically and socially, by agreements about constitutional purposes and limits (such as what is beyond the reach of national governance), and by social exclusions that long kept the most divisive conflicts – over race, labor, and gender – off the national political agenda (31-35). In Skowronek’s analysis, these exclusions were not simply political choices resulting from the biases and social relations of the time, but played a crucial stabilizing function, enabling constitutional consensus and resilience. As he sees it, throughout most of U.S. history, extensive social exclusions “served as a ballast, holding the system together and aiding in the redirection of its energies (35). Exclusion, then, serves as morally and politically unjust yet functional “management device” and consensus-building device: 

“[Exclusion] displaces conflicts over issues that would, if fully engaged, threaten the regime’s survival, and it smooths the way toward agreement on terms of contesting others. It’s not just that exclusions limit the range of interests and opinions the government needs to manage. Rather, the consensus is itself a tacit agreement about what lies beyond the reach of shared principles. The shared interests in government, the “public” interests, is sustained on mutual understandings of who and what are left out.”(34)

Skowronek’s account of bounded resilience raises a critical question: Were the social exclusions he identifies as morally repugnant but necessary stabilizing ballasts truly necessary for stabilization? And were they even very successful as “stabilizers” or did they generate the very civic conflicts and struggles that repeatedly destabilized earlier settlements, catalyzing transformative change? If exclusions served as management device for constraining divisive conflicts, at least for a time, they also fueld sustained challenges – from white working men, abolitionists, suffragists, labor activists, civil rights activists –  challenges that would forge new constitutional meanings and precedents. The formula of exclusion leading to system stability doesn’t seem to hold.

Skowronek’ Historical Cases: Constitutional Adaptation as Successes and Failures?

Skowronek grounds this troubling theoretical framework through a historical-structural approach — a systems-level analysis of pivotal confrontations between older structures of power and authority and new political developments that challenged them (8). He uses this historical exploration to tie bounded resilience to the original Constitution and to identify the conditions under which constitutional adaptation succeeds or fails. Yet we will see that his assessment raises questions about criteria for successful vs. unsuccessful adaptation, and whether constitutional adaptation always involves some combination of successes and failures: both/and rather than either/or. 

He begins by returning to constitutional creation and ratification, which Skowronek views both as the two most extraordinary acts of adaptive reordering in American political development, and as creating the Constitution’s bounded resilience (14). These actions established a set of fundamental principles (sometimes in tension, such as national supremacy and local autonomy, or majority rule and minority protection) and a new foundational structure spearheaded by federalism and separation of powers, as well as judicial independence, bicameralism, the electoral college, Article V Amendment process, and so on (15, 21). But this initial constitutional framework did not exist in the abstract; it was embedded in the founding era’s political and social milieu, including its extensive social exclusions (unpropertied men, African Americans, women, Indigenous peoples, and others).  Skowronek sees this combination of structure + social exclusions as creating the boundary conditions that would continue shaping attempts for constitutional change: “Each breakthrough projected the priority of inclusion onto a framework built to accommodate a more restricted range of participants, and each successive adaptation to democratization has had to reach farther afield to rationalize new governing arrangements”(23). 

Skowronek then takes us through a deeper dive into four historical case studies to “nail down the dynamics of adaptation and its limits” and understand what, other than constitutional principles alone, has supported or undermined adaptive reordering (26). He argues that post-constitutional adaptations have been very inconsistent, and the most “fully articulated” and successful of these, in his assessment, are the party state and administrative state (2, 17). 

He first examines 19th century expansion of political participation to white men without property, and what he views as a successful constitutional adaptation resulting in the “Party State,” which included institutional renovations and new auxiliaries to the Constitution that managed the incorporation of white male suffrage while suppressing issues of slavery to stabilize a new constitutional order (40-41, 52-53). The second case turns to the Reconstruction era, where, lacking sufficient consensus for reordering at every level (national, Northern, and in the Republican party), the transformative promises of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were “arrested and tightly contained in the follow-through” within a narrow time frame (64).  Instead of a successful adaptive reordering of race relations, there was a major reordering of the national economy (82). 

Next, Skowronek traces the 20th century expansions fueled by the movements of the Progressive Era – farmers, labor, women’s rights and suffrage. He interprets this as yielding successful adaptive reordering that “spanned across decades” and became durable through the Administrative State, which included new auxiliaries that managed demands for more direct democracy, labor and economic rights, and an expanded role of national government while maintaining Black exclusions (86-88).  Stability, again, came at the expense of democratic equality. 

The last and most consequential case is the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 70s, which achieved broad political inclusion and nationally enforceable civil rights and political equality.

Yet, in Skowronek's account, the civil rights movement and other movements of this time not only failed to generate a new constitutional consensus and stable adaptation, but ruptured the capacity for adaptation. It wasn’t “just that no stabilizing formula took hold,” he says, but that the institutional response reconfigured power and authority in ways that magnified conflicts over constitutional essentials, unleashing sixty years of struggle and “irresolution” (110-111).

His general take is that the 1960s civil rights movement dismantled federalism's barriers and enforced racial inclusion, followed by subsequent rights struggles and legislation for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, disability rights. As a broad sweep of groups were incorporated into full citizenship and equal rights, the constitutional system was “unbound” and lost its key stabilizing constraints: social exclusions and the grounding of constitutional principles and structure in the initial constitution. This, then, gave rise to “the adaptability paradox” headlining the book, which is roughly this: the continued expansion of democracy has been the “crowning achievement” of the constitutional system and engine of its resilience, but has also been the source of its current dysfunctions, and perhaps its undoing (109-110). Skowronek suggests that now

“the Constitution’s many contentious principles have been thrown up for grabs to a wider array of participant interests, and inconsistencies among those principles have been magnified in the process. The more we have prioritized democracy, the harder it has gotten to find the common sense of the old structure to recapture a set of shared purposes within it, to negotiate the kind of system-level adjustments to alleviate stress, to secure another way forward.” (22)

The consequences, in Skowronek's view, have been severe and perhaps irreversible. He sees the move to full inclusion as creating conditions where federalism’s capacity to filter divisive conflicts is “shattered” and constitutional principles are “up for grabs” by a wide range of competing interests, which stokes conflict and insecurity.  The result is zero-sum politics and "calcified" divisions that now permeate contemporary politics (125, 117).

Thus, Skowronek treats the Party State emerging from demands for workingmen’s suffrage and the Administrative State emerging from Progressive era efforts for democratization as overwhelmingly successful reorderings while treating the civil rights revolution as categorically different.  Not only did it fail to generate a successful reordering, he suggests, but it created a mouting constitutional catastrophe. This invites reconsideration. The Party State and Administrative State not only both  relied heavily on continued exclusions (of African Americans, women, and others), which he emphasizes, but they also gave rise to structural distortions that contribute to constitutional dysfunctions and undermine democratic accountability in the present, such as gerrymandering, primaries that empower extremes, and administrative capture. If  “successful” adaptations relied on exclusions that fueled resentments, civic struggles, and subsequent constitutional challenges, and if they also initiated or encouraged some significant structural problems for the functioning of constitutional democracy, does this not suggest that there are no thoroughly stabilizing constitutional reorderings?

It seems instead that all constitutional reorderings are inevitably partial, contested, subject to backlash and ongoing pushback, and result in mixed outcomes and unintended consequences. Rather than unmitigated successes and failures, we might see differences in degrees of success, and in the particular areas or types of failures.  The question of successful adaptation becomes especially salient when we turn to the civil rights revolution, where Skowronek sees outright failure to generate a new consensus. A closer look, however, reveals important institutional innovations and civic mechanisms that partially met his criteria for adaptation—points I develop in the next post.

While Skowronek’s framework prompts  questions about the role of exclusions and his judgment of successful and unsuccessful adaptations, his analysis offers two especially valuable contributions to our understanding of constitutional development.

Remaking Constitutional Meaning: The Extended Political Work of Reordering

Studies of constitutional transformation in the U.S. often center on the achievement of formal amendments or landmark “superstatutes” with less sustained attention to the extended, messy work of implementing change or translating promised transformations into reality (see, e.g., Ackerman 1991, 2014, Beaumont 2014). One of Skowronek’s powerful contributions is to turn our attention squarely to this crucial ongoing political work, and to broaden our understanding of the institutions and arrangements required to carry transformative reorderings forward, including new institutional mechanisms, "auxiliaries," and stabilizing consensus.  Skowronek’s approach brings insight and complexity to our understanding of constitutional developments, particularly those related to the rise of white male suffrage and to Progressive and New Deal era demands for constitutional transformation. By emphasizing constitutional reordering as an extended political process requiring new institutional arrangements, governing formulas, and auxiliaries, Skowronek reorients our understanding of how constitutional change actually works, and how long it can take. Reordering cannot be achieved merely through challenges to the old system, reinterpretations of constitutional principles, and articulations of new constitutional goals, nor can it be achieved through initial adoption of legislation or new  judicial decisions (28-29). Reordering requires extended political work over time, by multiple political institutions, and through a combination of innovative mechnanisms and adjustment of existing political instruments. For instance, the new constitutional goals and commitments advanced by multiple Progressive Era movements (labor activists, suffragists, farmers, and social reformers) were neither fully nor immediately implemented through successful struggles for four constitutional amendments achieved between 1913 and 1920 (the federal income tax (16th), direct election of senators (17th), prohibition (18th), and women's suffrage (19th). The follow-through on Progressive goals of reconfiguring institutional arrangements and governance around social reform, democratic accountability, and economic democracy extended over more than six decades. And it was carried forward not only through an array of landmark legislation – from the Pure Food and Drug Act and Federal Farm Act to the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act, Social Security Act, and National Labor Relations Act – but also (and, for Skowronek, overwhelmingly) through a new administrative state with new agencies, commissions, and regulatory bodies charged with overseeing new programs and enforcing new regulations. Constitutional reordering, Skowronek persuasively shows, comes not from amendments themselves but from this extended and layered follow-through. This conclusion has far-reaching implications for how we understand constitutional history and constitutional interpretation.

The Further Challenge to Originalism

The Adaptability Paradox’s account of repeated reordering offers a further challenge to the strict versions of originalism favored by the conservative legal movement.  Strict versions of originalism, such as Justice Antonin Scalia's original public meaning approach, treat the constitutional understandings of 1787 or subsequent ratification eras as a fixed and authoritative anchoring point for interpretation (Scalia 1998). Skowronek’s historical study provides additional illustrations of how “the Constitution’s operative meaning” and the “terms and conditions of constitutional government” have been repeatedly remade through reorderings, producing new constitutional meanings and consensus, each displacing previous versions. Together, these historical aspects of constitutional development undermine strict originalism's foundational premise: the constitutional order originalism seeks to recover never operated through text alone, never rested on a clear, fixed meaning, always depended on political actions and arrangements beyond what the text specifies or the founders could have anticipated, and repeatedly shifted as groups challenged and changed the initial constitutional order and the recognized citizenry and electorate expanded.  Skowronek’s challenge extends a growing body of scholarship on constitutional change and democratic development (See also, for example, Ackerman 1991, 2014; Ritter 2006;  Balkin 2011, Beaumont 2014, Gienapp 2018). 

The Adaptability Paradox gives us much to grapple with, offering many insights while raising many questions and leaving some s important dimensions of constitutional development underexamined, including his treatment of the civil rights revolution. In the next post, I examine how that era generated its own pragmatic adaptations through the rise of a civil and social rights state—new institutional mechanisms, overlapping social programs, and important (if contested) cross-racial buy-in—suggesting a partially successful reordering that Skowronek’s framework underestimates. 

Elizabeth Beaumont is Associate Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. You can reach her at beaumont@ucsc.edu.

Die beitragsfreie Familienversicherung

Die beitragsfreie Familienversicherung ist in § 10 I SGB V geregelt. Danach können Ehegatt*innen, Lebenspartner*innen und Kinder von Mitgliedern sowie die Kinder von familienversicherten Kindern in Deutschland unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen familienversichert werden. Familienversicherte Mitglieder der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung erlangen einen eigenen Versichertenstatus und erhalten den gleichen Versichertenschutz wie alle anderen Krankenkassenmitglieder, müssen jedoch keine eigenen Beiträge zahlen. Sie erreicht 15,6 Millionen beitragsfrei mitversicherte Ehegatt*innen, Lebenspartner*innen und Kinder. Kinder stellen dabei den weit überwiegenden Teil der Familienversicherten dar. Die beitragsfreie Familienversicherung ist ein Instrument des Familienlastenausgleichs und entlastet Familien mit Kindern ökonomisch erheblich. Denn der Beitrag der Stammversicherten – also derjenigen Personen, die die Familienmitglieder mitversichern – richtet sich nach deren Einkommen und nicht danach, wie viele Personen akzessorisch versichert werden. Dies gilt nach § 240 II 2 SGB V auch für die freiwillige Versicherung.

Ehe- vs. Familienförderung

Die FKG empfiehlt nun, den beitragsfreien Versicherungsschutz für Ehe- und Lebenspartner*innen abzuschaffen. Gleichzeitig soll der Schutz aber für Paare mit Kindern unter sechs Jahren fortgelten und so ihre Betreuungsbelastung anerkannt werden. Dahinter steht weiterhin die gesetzliche Vorstellung, dass die innerhalb einer Ehe (oder Lebenspartner*innenschaft) begründete Familie schutzwürdiger sei als jene außerhalb. Diese Vorstellung trägt verfassungsrechtlich jedoch nicht. Die beitragsfreie Familienversicherung zugunsten des Kindes ist Teil des Familienlastenausgleichs und findet ihre Begründung im Familienfördergebot des Art. 6 I GG, das einem weiten gesetzgeberischen Handlungsspielraum unterliegt. Das Bundesverfassungsgericht definiert in ständiger Rechtsprechung die Familie als „Lebensgemeinschaft zwischen Eltern und Kindern“ – unabhängig von der Ehe. Art. 6 I GG statuiert auch ein Fördergebot zugunsten der Ehe: Aus der Gestaltungsfreiheit der Eheleute folgt, dass diese sich frei zwischen Alleinverdiener*innenehe oder der Doppelverdiener*innenehe entscheiden können sollen. Zwar darf der Staat die Ehe gegenüber anderen Formen des Zusammenlebens privilegieren und auch finanziell besserstellen, also gewisse Anreize für die Ehe setzen. Die Benachteiligung anderer Beziehungsformen bedarf aber einer sachgerechten Rechtfertigung. So wirft die Reform die Frage auf, wie sich die Gebote der Ehe- und Familienförderung aus Art. 6 I GG zueinander verhalten.

Strukturelle Fehlanreize zulasten von Frauen

Die beitragsfreie Mitversicherung der Familienangehörigen ist ein Beispiel dafür, wie sehr die Bundesrepublik früher auf die traditionelle Familie als Grundlage ihrer Sozialpolitik setzte. Jüngere Familienleistungen wie das Elterngeld oder die Rechtsansprüche auf institutionelle Kinderbetreuung zeigen, dass die Familienpolitik die Unterstützung der Familie nicht mehr allein ins Private verschiebt. Die Familienversicherung entstammt historisch der Vorstellung, dass der Arbeitnehmer und seine Familie eine schutzbedürftige Einheit bilden. So stand den mitversicherten Familienmitgliedern bis 1992 auch lediglich ein abgeleiteter Versichertenschutz und keine eigene Mitgliedschaft in der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung zu. Feministische Rechtswissenschaften haben diese Mitversicherung der Ehe- und Lebenspartner*innen umfassend kritisiert, auch wenn die Absicherung zumindest die Sorgearbeit anerkannte.¹⁾ Denn die beitragsfreie Familienversicherung belohnt die Alleinverdiener*innenehe: Wer als Paar zusammen so viel verdient wie eine alleinverdienende Person, zahlt unter Umständen doppelt so hohe Beiträge, weil jedes Einkommen einzeln verbeitragt wird. Zugleich ist die Mitversicherung auch möglich, wenn die Partner*in einer geringfügigen Beschäftigung nachgeht und damit unter der gesetzten Einkommensgrenze der Familienversicherung bleibt.²⁾ So machen Frauen den weit überwiegenden Anteil der mitversicherten Erwachsenen aus; der Stammversicherte ist meist immer noch männlich. Die derzeitige Ausgestaltung fördert die immer noch auf den männlichen Hauptverdiener ausgerichtete Aufteilung von Erwerbs- und Sorgearbeit und setzt gerade keine Anreize dafür, dass Frauen eine versicherungspflichtige Erwerbstätigkeit aufnehmen. Dieses Argument nimmt auch der Bericht auf.

Bilder der Vergangenheit

Das Privileg der beitragsfreien Familienversicherung ist bislang nur im Rahmen der Ehe und der Lebenspartnerschaft vorgesehen. Indem die Familienversicherung aber auf Partnerschaftsebene an die Ehe anknüpft, stellt sie die Begründung als Familienlastenausgleich in Frage.³⁾ Auch kinderlose Ehepaare werden von der beitragsfreien Familienversicherung begünstigt – obwohl keine Kinder zu versorgen sind. Andersherum werden über 30 % der Kinder außerehelich geboren; ihre Eltern profitieren nicht vom Schutz der Familienversicherung. Hier zeigt sich ein bestimmtes Familienleitbild, das sich auf das Kind auswirkt: Eine Familie besteht aus zwei miteinander verheirateten Elternteilen, die als Garanten für die Stabilität der Familie gelten. Diese Vorstellung legte das BVerfG im Jahr 2003 auch einer Entscheidung zugrunde, in der es um § 10 III SGB V ging. Die Norm schließt Kinder von der Familienversicherung aus, wenn nicht beide Elternteile Mitglieder der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung sind und das privat versicherte Elternteil über ein hohes und regelmäßig höheres Einkommen als das des anderen Elternteils verfügt. In seiner Entscheidung argumentierte das Gericht damals, dass nach damaliger Rechtslage das Kind durch die gegenseitigen unterhaltsrechtlichen Verpflichtungen der Eheleute besser versorgt sei als ein nichteheliches Kind. Auch als es um die Frage ging, ob verheiratete Paare von der Förderung der künstlichen Befruchtung durch die gesetzliche Krankenversicherung ausgeschlossen werden dürfen, hatte das BVerfG angenommen, dass die Ehe dem Kind als Lebensbasis mehr rechtliche Sicherheit biete. Ob dies auch noch nach der Angleichung des Betreuungsunterhalts von ehelichen und nichtehelichen Kindern trägt, hat das BVerfG bislang dahinstehen lassen. Die Reform der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung verfestigt dieses Leitbild nun wieder. Dabei bleibt außer Betracht, dass Familien auch unabhängig von der Ehe nach Art. 6 I GG zu fördern sind. Verfassungsrechtlich gehen der Schutz der Ehe und der Schutz der Familie nicht zwingend Hand in Hand. Denn, so auch das BVerfG, „nicht jede Ehe [ist] auf Kinder ausgerichtet“; nicht jede Ehe ist „die Vorstufe zur Familie“ (so aber im Sondervotum zur Ausweitung des Ehegattensplittings auf die eingetragene Lebenspartnerschaft). Wenn Eltern Kinder zur Welt bringen und erziehen, leisten sie – unabhängig von ihrem Partnerschaftsstatus – einen Beitrag zugunsten der Sozialversicherungssysteme, die auf nachwachsende Generationen ausgerichtet sind. Diesen Beitrag hat das BVerfG grundsätzlich auch für den Zweig der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung anerkannt.

Sorge statt Ehe als Maßstab

Der Reformvorschlag erkennt Fürsorgeverpflichtungen als entlastungsbedürftig an und gewährt Ehe- und Lebenspartner*innen mit Kindern unter sechs Jahren weiterhin eine beitragsfreie Familienversicherung. Junge Kinder haben einen hohen Betreuungsbedarf und erschweren – gerade angesichts der noch immer unzureichenden institutionellen Kinderbetreuung – die Teilnahme am Erwerbsarbeitsmarkt beider Elternteile. Dem trägt der Reformvorschlag Rechnung, indem er die Erwerbstätigkeit ab dem Grundschulalter mit den familiären Betreuungspflichten als vereinbar erklärt. Diese Erkenntnis zeigt sich auch in anderen Bereichen des Sozialrechts, etwa wenn § 10 I Nr. 3 SGB II die Erwerbstätigkeit aufgrund der Erziehung eines Kindes unter drei Jahren für unzumutbar erklärt. Soll die gesetzliche Krankenversicherung diese Belastung weiterhin ausgleichen, ist die Beitragsfreiheit aber auch auf nicht verheiratete Eltern oder Alleinerziehende auszuweiten. Die beitragsfreie Versicherung ließe sich etwa zugunsten der Erwerbsaufnahme an konkrete zeitlich definierte Betreuungsbelastungen knüpfen, etwa während der Elternzeit. Dies würde sich auch auf die Versicherung von ledigen Elternteilen in der Elternzeit auswirken. Eltern, die vor der Inanspruchnahme von Elternzeit pflichtversichert waren, bleiben während eines bestehenden Beschäftigungsverhältnisses beitragsfrei versichert, unabhängig vom Elterngeld. Vor der Elternzeit freiwillig versicherte Elternteile hingegen zahlen in dieser Zeit zumindest einen Minimalbeitrag. Auch dies erweist sich als widersprüchlich, wenn das Sozialsystem Sorgebelastung ausgleichen möchte.

Fazit

Der Reformvorschlag gibt also Anlass, den Zweck der beitragsfreien Familienversicherung zu reflektieren. Dabei geht es nicht darum, sozialstaatliche Leistungen mit Sparpaketen weiter zurückzudrängen – im Gegenteil: Eine sorgezentrierte Ausgestaltung könnte mehr Familien absichern als die bisherige Regelung. Dass Kinder beitragsfrei mitversichert werden sollten, steht außer Frage. Die entscheidende Frage lautet nicht, ob Sorgearbeit abgesichert werden sollte, sondern für wen. Mit Blick auf die Mitversicherung von Ehegatt*innen und Lebenspartner*innen ist zu prüfen: Geht es um die Förderung der Ehe oder Lebenspartner*innenschaft – dann muss die beitragsfreie Familienversicherung weiterhin auch kinderlose Paare begünstigen – oder um eine Familienförderung und damit um Entlastung aufgrund der Sorgetätigkeit? Eltern sind durch einen erhöhten Betreuungsbedarf belastet, der aber nicht nur bei ehelichen Kindern entsteht. Es ist daher konsequent, die beitragsfreie Familienversicherung nicht an die Ehe zu knüpfen, sondern an die in der Familie übernommene Sorgeverantwortung.

The post Das Ende der Versicherung der Ehe appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

According to the ECtHR, this is a systemic defect which inherently and continually affects the independence of any person so appointed (as of today, more than 3,000 persons have been irregularly appointed to judicial posts in Poland, i.e., approximately 30% of the judges of that country). For the CJEU, however, the involvement of the neo-NCJ – notwithstanding its manifest lack of independence the Court had previously established – does not suffice in and of itself to call into question the independence or impartiality of such irregularly appointed persons. At the same time, and for the first time, the CJEU has called for a “legislative framework” to remedy this systemic problem and restore public trust in Poland’s judicial system in its judgment of 24 March 2026 in Case C-521/21.

Until such time, the CJEU has ruled that neo-judges attached to ordinary courts may only be recused on a case-by-case basis, requiring the country’s lawful judges tasked with doing so to consider all relevant “circumstances”. However, and this is an important qualification, such individual assessment is not required for the neo-judges appointed to courts of last resort (fake or otherwise) as they may already be considered not to meet the requirements of an “independent and impartial tribunal previously established by law” on account of existing ECtHR and CJEU case law. Their decisions may be furthermore held “null and void”.

In addition to being (excessively?) complex, the CJEU’s twofold approach prioritises, in essence, system stability over the individual right to effective judicial protection. As the Court’s short-term solution (circumstances-based assessment of each neo-judge) is bound to produce inconsistencies while the Court’s long-term solution (new “legislative framework”) will not see the light of day anytime soon, litigants will continue to endure a 30% probability of having their disputes adjudicated by defectively appointed “judges”. So much for the rule of law but this is what happens when you let systemic violations fester for years (in this instance, it took the Court a total of 1,674 days to issue a preliminary ruling but the real culprit remains the Commission as it has failed to launch an infringement action targeting the neo-NCJ for years).

Systemic or not systemic, that is the question

The judgment is compelling in the Court’s interpretation of EU law in respect of Poland’s legislation conferring on a body, which is not a lawful court, exclusive jurisdiction to adjudicate an application seeking the recusal of defectively appointed neo-judges. Hereto, the Court reiterates its previous case law regarding Poland’s bogus “Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs” and “Constitutional Tribunal”.

In short, the CJEU makes clear once more that national courts must disregard this piece of legislation and the outputs of these two bodies as they are not proper courts. Polish authorities must furthermore “ensure that there is effective judicial review enabling, where appropriate, the lawfulness of the judicial appointment procedure to be reviewed”. It follows that a national court must be able, where relevant, “to ascertain whether an irregularity vitiating the procedure for the appointment of a judge could have led to an infringement of the fundamental right to an effective remedy before an independent and impartial tribunal previously established by law”. No court, let alone a body masquerading as a constitutional court, can prohibit any (lawful) court from ascertaining whether another body meets EU rule of law requirements.

So far, so good.

The CJEU’s reasoning becomes more difficult to follow when it gets to the situation of the 3,000+ persons irregularly appointed to judicial posts, the possibility to recuse them, and the broader issue of whether they should be allowed to continue to perform their judicial duties.

Using euphemisms (e.g. “new composition”), the Court begins by minimising the grossly unconstitutional nature of the neo-NCJ and its sustained involvement in anti-rule of law activities, which resulted inter alia in its unprecedented expulsion from the relevant European network in 2021. It is striking, for instance, to see the CJEU referring to the case law of the ECtHR yet simultaneously omitting its most severe findings. In brief, the ECtHR has repeatedly stressed that the involvement of the neo-NCJ in any appointment procedure amounts to a systemic and fundamental defect which inherently undermines the independence of and impartiality of any court consisting, in part or in whole, of irregularly appointed “neo-judges”. For the Strasbourg Court, however, the effects of this systemic defect can vary depending on the type of court and its position within the judiciary. While the Strasbourg Court has yet to clarify what this approach means beyond the neo-judges irregularly appointed to courts of last resort such as Poland’s Supreme Court and who cannot lawfully adjudicate, the ECtHR has not required any individual assessment of the circumstances pertaining to each of Poland’s 3,000+ defective judicial appointments. The CJEU has, however, decided to follow a different twofold approach, which ultimately leads it to tying itself in knots.

The Court’s long-term solution: remedial legislative action

Considering the “systemic nature” of Poland’s irregular judicial appointments according to the Court itself, the CJEU holds for the first time that “a case-by-case assessment of compliance with the requirement of a ‘tribunal previously established by law’, in procedures for recusal on the basis of the circumstances in which the judges in question were appointed, cannot, in principle [emphasis added], suffice to ensure full compliance” with this requirement.

The judgment is particularly striking when the Court enumerates the multiple and serious consequences flowing from “the existence of systemic or generalised interferences with the independence of the national judiciary resulting” from Poland’s irregular appointments. The Court rightly stresses that this situation undermines inter alia the EU’s system of remedies, the full effect of EU law, and the “effectiveness of the functioning of justice”.

The Court’s first (but broad) endorsement of the ECtHR pilot-judgment of 23 November 2023 in Wałęsa v. Poland is yet another positive feature. While there is no such pilot-judgment procedure in EU law, one paragraph in the CJEU judgment may be misconstrued as amounting to a de facto (possibly unprecedented) EU pilot-judgment as the Court explicitly calls for remedial action in the form of a legislative framework that enables, in view of the nature and gravity of the irregularities committed during the judicial appointment procedure, an assessment of the possibilities for persons irregularly appointed to judicial posts to continue to perform their duties.

Without debating whether such a remedial call goes beyond the limits of the Court’s preliminary ruling jurisdiction, it is remarkable to see the CJEU going beyond the issue of recusal and calling upon “the national legal order” to essentially get its act together. While unsurprisingly recognising that Poland has broad discretion considering the obvious lack of a “single model” when it comes to correcting “systemic irregularities in the appointments to judicial posts”, the Court does constrain this discretion by holding “that only those irregularly appointed persons who have provided sufficient guarantees of independence and impartiality may continue to perform their duties” (emphasis added).

This means, a contrario, that a legislature may address the situation of irregularly appointed persons by not providing these guarantees en bloc, including by removing them from the judiciary. A word is indeed noticeable by its absence: irremovability. And while the notion of “sufficient guarantees” is not self-explanatory, this may yet be understood as opening the door to Poland’s current draft law which distinguishes between different categories of irregularly appointed individuals, a draft law broadly endorsed by the Venice Commission last month: (i) the “green group” (i.e., novice judges); (ii) the “yellow group” (i.e., judges transferred or promoted via the neo-NCJ but who had been appointed as judges before March 2018); (iii) the “red group” (i.e., individuals appointed by the neo-NCJ, some of whom in open breach of domestic court orders, who had not previously held any judicial position).

Having repeatedly acknowledged the systemic nature of Poland’s irregular judicial appointments and called for a systemic (legislative) solution, the Court moves on to the immediate, practical issue raised by the referring court: Can a party require the recusal of an ordinary court neo-judge on account of his/her irregular appointment in the absence of remedial legislative action? Here, the Court’s stop-gap solution fails to convince.

The Court’s short-term solution: case-by-case assessments

Instead of adopting the judicial hierarchy-based approach favoured by the Strasbourg Court (i.e., the independence of all of the neo-judges has been systemically affected but the effects of this systemic defect may be differently assessed depending on the type of court and its position within the judiciary), and/or the complementary category-based approach favoured by Poland’s current legislature outlined above, the CJEU has decided to ask lawful judges to follow a case-by-case approach until a “legislative framework” is adopted.

This means that Poland’s lawful judges are being (t)asked to undertake – some of them already are – a time-consuming case-by-base assessment of all relevant circumstances pertaining to each irregularly appointed neo-judge prior to being able to decide whether an adjudicating panel consisting of/including such a person, is still a lawful court. This approach is however difficult to reconcile with the Court’s earlier finding that “in view of the systemic nature of irregular appointments, a case-by-case assessment (…) in procedures for recusal (…) cannot, in principle, suffice to ensure full compliance” with the EU law requirement “that cases coming within the scope of EU law be examined by independent courts or tribunals”.

Yet a case-by-case assessment is precisely what the Court is requiring Poland’s lawful judges to do until a legislation is adopted to sort out the situation of the country’s “unlawful judges”. To better justify this approach, the Court simultaneously – and arguably unnecessarily – minimises the grave irregularity caused by the participation of an unconstitutional body in every single judicial appointment (or promotion) procedure post-2018.

Bottom line, the CJEU accepts that grave systemic irregularities exist and that there is an urgent need to restore public trust in the Polish judicial system as a whole. As the CJEU is simultaneously of the view that this may only be achieved via remedial action of a legislative nature, national (lawful) judges are asked to do what they can on a case-by-case basis even though the Court accepts this cannot ensure full compliance with EU rule of law requirements. The adjective “messy” may come to mind.

In the present instance – notwithstanding the limits of its jurisdiction under Article 267 TFEU – the Court has furthermore deemed it helpful to do the individual assessment for the referring court. And for the Court, the neo-judge who is the subject of a recusal motion cannot be recused as “it does not appear that any other factual and legal circumstance such as to call into question the independence or impartiality of that judge can be established”.

Stability is preserved but this is achieved at a significant cost, with the litigants’ right to effective judicial protection taking a back seat. There is, however, only so much the CJEU can do in a context where the Commission and the Council have persistently failed to demand remedial action before declaring “mission accomplished” in 2024 and closing inter alia Poland’s Article 7(1) TEU procedure. Fast forwarding to 2026, the CJEU was forced to acknowledge that “irregular appointments to judicial posts are systemic in Poland” and do the Commission and Council’s job. Looking beyond Poland, this sorry episode may well convince would-be autocrats that one is better off just going big and going fast when seeking to capture a country’s judiciary via thousands of illegal judges. The EU just won’t stand in the way of lawlessness that much.

The post Poland’s “Illegal Judges” appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

The Judgments in New Mexico and Los Angeles

On 24 March 2026, the First Judicial District Court of New Mexico ordered Meta to pay a penalty of $375 million for violating consumer protection law on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp in the case State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms, Inc. The jury found thousands of violations of consumer protection laws regarding the treatment of children on the company’s social media platforms.

Just one day later, the jury of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County found Meta (Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) and Google (YouTube) liable for negligence and defective design on their platforms in the case K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al. A 20-years old women sued both companies, alleging that they made her addictive to their products thereby caused her serious psychological harm. The woman began using the platforms as a child and attributes her depression, body dysmorphia and anxiety to them. The companies argued that the plaintiff’s condition was caused by her personal social and familial circumstances and that there was no proof that she was actually addicted to the platforms.

This argument, however, did not convince the jury. The jury concluded that both companies acted negligently regarding the design and operation of their platforms, marking a shift from content to design in their consideration. They awarded the plaintiff $6 million in compensation (a combination of compensatory and punitive damages), with Meta bearing 70 %.

Meta and Google will appeal the judgments, but they could set a precedent, as over a thousand similar lawsuits are pending.

A Wake-up call for human rights litigation?

This latest U.S. social media litigation focused on consumer protection law and on tort law (product liability and negligence). Both judgments appear, at first glance, to have nothing to do with human rights. Yet, they constitute a first step towards the legal recognition of the negative mental effects of social media and might therefore also have implications for human rights litigation.

The human rights protection of the mind is still rather underdeveloped in case law and legal scholarship. There even appears to be a certain reluctance to conceptualise psychological harm in legal terms and to recognise negative mental effects as a violation of human rights (see Bublitz/Merkel). Against this background, there have been even calls for introducing new human rights to protect the mind (so-called neurorights). Yet, even without new rights, there is a rich legal stock that could be activated.

There is, first of all, the right to mental integrity enshrined in Article 8 ECHR (cf. ECtHR Guide) and arguably Article 17 ICCPR. The EU Charter even explicitly codifies this right in Article 3 CFR. The right protects mental health, but also mental well-being more broadly. Furthermore, in the European context, the right arguably also protects against unwanted interferences into one’s mind and thus also safeguards mental self-determination (Ligthart; Michalowski).

Besides mental integrity, there is the right to freedom of thought explicitly recognized in most human rights treaties, such as Article 18 ICCPR, Article 9 ECHR, Article 13 ACHR, and Article 10 CFR (on this right in various jurisdictions, including Germany, cf. O’Callaghan/Shiner). Yet, this right has been rather neglected in case law so far and is underdeveloped. It could be interpreted broadly as protecting mental experience and mental being as a whole, including mental features such as attention. In this regard, it is often linked to mental autonomy, ensuring a self-determined use of technologies and the absence of manipulative features (cf. Istace; Keese/Leiser; UN Report Shaheed) – specifically on social media (see Bublitz).

Henceforth, established rights are protecting against negative or unwanted impacts on the human mind. Yet, the crucial question remains whether the social media practices in question amount to an interference with these rights. The addictive design features of social media, such as infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, and autoplay videos, are widely discussed (see Pałka/Ilczuk). Still, the legal recognition and attribution of a causal harm remain disputed. The negative effects are often not caused by a single intervention but results from an accumulation over time (cf. Bublitz). Furthermore, as Meta argued in the KGM case, one could contend that it is not the platform’s design that is the main factor, but rather the individual user behaviour and their social and family environment. Hence, one faces both conceptual and empirical difficulties.

This reminds of the challenges faced in the context of climate change, where diffuse damages and a complex interplay between various actors takes place (see Heri). In the context of climate change, litigation has increased following the initial court victories, such as the Urgenda case (cf. Maxwell et al.). Last week’s U.S. rulings could mark such a moment for big tech litigation, as the courts recognised for the first time that the mental effects caused by social media are legally relevant. This is not only important for civil proceedings but also for human rights. Courts may be more inclined to classify these social media practices as human rights interference, for example with the right to mental integrity or freedom of thought, thereby introducing new positive obligations on the states.

Why human rights?

Yet why should one engage in human rights litigation when there are other legal avenues available? In Europe, the Digital Services Act (DSA) provides a comprehensive regulation of social media platforms. The competent authorities could impose sanctions under Article 52 DSA et seq. for insufficient risk assessment and mitigation (Article 34, 35 DSA) by social media platforms regarding mental well-being (cf. Baranowska/Malgieri). Additionally, users could seek compensation for damages or loss they suffered as a result of provider’s non-compliance with the DSA (Article 54 DSA). These are promising avenues to explore.

Still, human rights litigation may prove increasingly valuable in the years to come. Private actors are not directly bound by human rights and human rights have only an indirect effect between them through their positive dimension (cf. Bjorge). States are obliged to protect individuals from human rights infringements by other individuals and to redress and punish such behaviour (cf. Akandji-Kombe; HRC GC 31). Yet, they enjoy a wide margin of appreciation as to how to fulfil these obligations. They can do so by adopting or effectively enforcing regulations to prevent harm, or by ensuring redress through civil remedies or criminal law. Human rights can thus create positive duties on states to regulate platforms. This is particularly promising for jurisdictions that, unlike the EU, do not yet regulate social media. Even where regulation exists, states may have a positive obligation to ensure its effective implementation and enforcement. Human rights, in their positive dimension, thus go beyond individual compensation and allow to consider the broader regulatory structure. Human rights litigation can reveal gaps and enforcement deficits in existing regulation, such as the DSA, and oblige states to address them.

Furthermore, many jurisdictions, notably the EU, follow a different approach to the U.S., which is not only a common law system but also traditionally relies on liability as a corrective mechanism in a relatively unregulated market. The EU, however, along with most of its member states, pursues a regulatory and rights-based approach (cf. Bradford). Fundamental rights are explicitly referred to and integrated in regulation such as the DSA (e.g. Article 34(1)b DSA). Clearer human rights standards established through litigation can therefore also strengthen the interpretation and application of legislation such as the DSA or domestic civil law, for instance by prompting a reconsideration of liability rules, which have traditionally been reluctant to award damages for purely psychological harm (see Pałka/Ilczuk; Wendehorst). Litigation can clarify the scope of existing rights and delineate states obligations even if ultimately no violation is found.

Outlook

The two U.S. judgments are but a small first step forward, particularly as they focus on children’s health as well as serious psychological effects. Although they do not address broader issues of mental well-being and autonomy, they are a first legal recognition of the harmful mental effects of social media, encompassing both the systemic and the personal dimension. These initial legal victories will likely trigger further litigation within and beyond the U.S. In Europe, mobilisation of the DSA may be the preferable first option, particularly as the European Commission appears increasingly willing to enforce it rigorously. Yet human rights offer a broader playing field. In their positive dimension, they extend beyond individual compensation by considering the wider regulatory structure. They could therefore provide an additional pathway towards creating a liveable digital environment for all users.

The post Litigating Human Rights of the Mind appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Jeremy Kessler 

Stephen Skowronek’s The Adaptability Paradox offers an admirably concise overview of American political and legal development from the Founding to the present day. That would be enough to make it a valuable addition to legal scholars’ bookshelves and graduate students’ orals lists. But the book is more than synthesis. It advances an original, interpretive argument about the paradox that churns in the engine room of American constitutional government. According to Skowronek, the trend that has defined American legal and political development is the transfer of ever greater power to the national government in response to ever more expansive bids for social and political “inclusion” (pp. 20-25, 209-11). Whether dubbed “democratization” (p.3) or “inclusive nationalization,” which more precisely captures Skowronek’s meaning, this trend has periodically pushed up against two stabilizing features of American constitutional government. The first is the original constitutional text, which sought to protect particular and local interests from national majorities. The second is a series of social exclusions (of the propertyless, of Black Americans, of women, and so on) that enabled coordination and cooperation among otherwise rivalrous particular and local interests. As inclusive nationalization dislodged particular and local interests and overrode social exclusions, new “auxiliary” institutions emerged to restabilize constitutional government. The most significant of these extra-constitutional auxiliaries were the “party state” of the nineteenth century and the “administrative state” of the twentieth (p. 19, 39-108). Each helped to mediate the conflicts unleashed by inclusive nationalization, establishing new mechanisms for coordination and cooperation across an ever larger and more diverse polity.

The mid-twentieth century rights revolution largely fulfilled the project of inclusive nationalization, but it left no new auxiliary in its wake (pp. 126-156). Today, as a result, social struggle takes the form of factional appeals to bare yet indeterminate constitutional principles. The goal of these appeals is to secure greater factional control of the formal branches of constitutional government and the old extra-constitutional auxiliaries of party and bureaucracy (pp. 26-29, 203-205). Principles alone, however, cannot and have never knit back together riven social relations. Only a novel auxiliary institution, capable of coordinating contemporary social rivalries, could restabilize constitutional government. The absence of such an auxiliary leads Skowronek to ask whether the very diversity of the present polity and the intensity of its inclusive (if often rivalrous) expectations now impede the construction of a new coordinating mechanism (pp. 225-233). In other words, the laudable capacity of American constitutional government to adapt to inclusive nationalization may have rendered further adaptation impossible. Hence, the “paradox” of Skowronek’s title.

So described, Skowronek offers a distinctively American complement to the burgeoning comparative literature on tensions between inclusivity and liberal democracy.[1] Others will undoubtedly take up the normative implications of this framework, implications that Skowronek himself flags as troubling in the Preface (pp. ix-x). I wish instead to question Skowronek’s empirical assumption that the underlying cause of “the adaptability paradox” is democratization. Cashed out as inclusive nationalization, democratization is definitionally destabilizing. The very telos of the historical process posited by Skowronek is the transcendence of the particularisms, localisms, and exclusions that stabilized earlier constitutional settlements. But why would a society select for its own supersession in this way?

There are many potential answers to this question, but Skowronek’s attribution of explanatory primacy to democratization suggests an idealist or a voluntarist one. The idealist answer: a normative preference for inclusion has characterized American political culture from the outset, notwithstanding formal and informal efforts to forestall the result. Respect for that inclusive ideal gradually undermined old exclusions and transferred power to national auxiliaries to manage the growing diversity of the polity. The voluntarist answer: the causal power of democratization is really just the causal power of a recurring coalition of out-groups excluded from earlier constitutional settlements and those in-group members who embraced the moral and practical rewards of accommodating new bids for inclusion. Each of these answers, however, is almost as question-begging as the text’s explicit stipulation of a transhistorical drift toward inclusive nationalization. Whence the commitment to, and causal power of, the inclusive ideal? What explains the regularity with which out-groups and inclusionary in-group members overcame the resistance of in-group factions committed to exclusion?

One non-question-begging answer to the question of why American society continually and successfully dug up its moorings in the interest of inclusion is puzzlingly absent from Skowronek’s account: the development of capitalism between the Founding and the present day. Capitalism is an engine of inclusion in that it subjects an ever-greater share of the population to market dependence. Once market dependence becomes a universal condition within a given society, all members of that society enjoy the equal right (if not the equal capacity) to sell and buy labor power. But capitalism is also an engine of exclusion, insulating from legal and political contestation a novel social hierarchy: the one that subordinates the many who control only their own labor power to the few who control all other means of production. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, this distinctively capitalist dynamic of inclusion and exclusion gradually emerged, driven by the interaction between technological innovation and class struggle.[2] It is that interactive, material process which provides the explanatory ballast that Skowronek’s account lacks. Or so the remainder of this Response will try to demonstrate. 

1) The Founding 

The constitutional settlement of 1789 testified to a commercially sophisticated society whose economic base nonetheless lay in freehold agriculture – that is, family-owned farms that produced most of the goods needed for their own reproduction. A significant percentage of those farms, especially larger ones in the South, relied on the purchase of enslaved persons for both subsistence and market production. Some non-slaveholding farms also relied on wage labor, mainly for market production. Regardless of their dependence on enslaved or waged labor, freeholders generally supported the use of organized violence to dispossess Native polities of the land necessary for settler expansion. Overall, the country’s predominant economic sector – agriculture – was characterized by highly uneven integration into national and international markets. Merchants and artisans were more dependent on these markets, but only occasionally for wage labor. In general, wage labor was viewed as a state of dependency little better than enslavement and, in most states, the propertyless could not vote or hold political office. Governing would be the business of an alliance of the largest landowners and merchants.[3]

In the decades following ratification, a spate of technological innovations, including the cotton gin, the steamboat, canal and turnpike infrastructure, interchangeable-parts manufacturing, and early textile machinery – had a complex effect on the balance of class forces. The economies of scale enabled by new technology meant even greater social power for the biggest merchants, artisans, and slaveholders. But these very economies also spurred demand for both waged and enslaved labor. This increasingly dynamic if unequal society gave rise to what Skowronek calls the “party state.”[4]

2) The Party State

The party state superintended a society that was increasingly saturated by both commerce and industry yet persistently disdainful of wage labor. The majority of voters still possessed their own farms and firms, even as a growing percentage had to shoulder debt to do so. Freehold agriculture still dominated the agricultural sector, even as a growing percentage of that sector’s yield depended on slave labor. An alliance of small farmers, artisans, and slaveholders undergirded both Jefferson’s Republican Party and, a few decades later, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren’s Democratic Party. Their chief opponents, whether Federalist, National Republican, or Whig, viewed industrial and financial innovation, rather than agricultural and artisanal independence, as the key to sustained national prosperity and power. Despite this deep socio-economic division, the party state proved relatively stable because of the relations of production it managed, with great effort, to depoliticize. The formal validity of Southern slavery was not to be questioned, even if the geographical reach of the South was subject to debate. The social propriety of wage labor was not to be endorsed, even as the population of wage laborers, especially foreign-born laborers in Northern cities, ballooned. The dominant political coalitions also supported the continuing disruption of Native relations of production and expropriation of the land on which those relations depended. In this way, the party state facilitated the commercialization of the nation and the industrialization of the North precisely by deferring the violence that these trends made all but inevitable: the reconstruction of relations of production along fully capitalist lines.[5]

Ultimately, Black resistance to enslavement tipped the balance by stymying Southern industrialization. Although plantation agriculture was more productive than earlier generations of historians thought possible, slave-based industry was incompatible with the form of social control that slaveholders already struggled to impose within the confines of the plantation. Nor could slaveholders ask non-slaveholding whites to reduce themselves to the status of wage laborers without jeopardizing the cross-class racial alliance that held the South together as a political power. These material and ideological factors deprived the South of an industrial base capable of competing with the North electorally, economically, or militarily in the medium term. In the late 1850s, a new alliance of Northern Whigs, Democrats, and abolitionists embraced this state of affairs. They did so not by calling for the immediate abolition of Southern slavery but by reimagining the relationship between industrialization and freeholding. Industrial and independent production were not antagonistic interests, Lincoln’s Republicans implied, but a political economic whole bound together by railroads, westward homesteading, and the social mobility – rather than the dependency – afforded by wage labor. This novel material and ideological synthesis shattered the party state, structured abolition, and paved the way for Skowronek’s second extra-constitutional auxiliary: the administrative state.[6]

3) The Administrative State

The administrative state was – and to a significant extent remains – the institutional expression of both the normalization of wage labor and the corporate concentration that accompanied it. Those changes in the relations of production were themselves favored by the technological innovations of the second industrial revolution. As such, the administrative state to this day mirrors the organizational logic of industrial capitalism, including its hierarchies of principal-agent relationships, its tendency to conceive of society in terms of interest-group pluralism, and its preference for synoptic decision-making. What made any of this democratic always has been a bit obscure, just as economic democracy remained a left-leaning reform program rather than a lived reality. But the administrative state did work to facilitate the inclusion of ever more of the national population into relations of market dependence, and to mediate conflicts arising at the intersection of formal equality and material subordination.[7]

Pace Skowronek, this project was only occasionally at cross-purposes with the mid-century rights revolution, which insisted upon formal equality for those still excluded from the market while also targeting various forms of material subordination. Rights reformers did have to confront sectors of the administrative state that remained captured by local and particular partisans of exclusion. And reformers’ most ambitious sallies against the material subordination of wage workers were bound to come to naught absent a truly social revolution. But, for the most part, mid-century rights reformers and federal administrators inhabited the same possibility space, circumscribed as it was by the geostrategic struggle between capitalism and communism. At least on the home front, that struggle favored both greater formal equality and modest alleviations of material subordination.[8]

What ultimately destabilized the administered society of mid-century America, then, was not the imperative of inclusive nationalization. A slowdown in industrial productivity during the mid-1960s launched a new wave of technological innovation and class struggle that crashed across the borders of the nation-state itself. Although this wave did not by any means wash away the administrative state, it overwhelmed the capacity of Skowronek’s second extra-constitutional auxiliary to manage an era of almost unbounded social rivalry.[9]

4) Constitutional Formalism and Informational Capitalism

Between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, computerization, containerization, and financialization helped to restore both productivity and profitability. Each of these developments pushed against the physical boundaries of the nation-state, favoring ever greater capital and labor mobility. Partly for that reason, the restoration of productivity and profitability came at a significant cost to the administrability of American society. Whatever the pressure that inclusive nationalization had placed on social bonds, globalization foreclosed the possibility of a complete identification between polity and population – that is, the increasingly transnational mass of wage laborers who powered the American economy. As for the significant subset of that population that encompassed citizens and lawful residents of the United States, they experienced a greater degree of formal equality than ever before but also an unexpected and disorienting increase in material inequality. The promise of informational equality, whether articulated in terms of access to education or to digital infrastructure, sought in vain to bridge the growing gap between the formal and the material. Yet the new politics of information reflected, even if it could not meaningfully alter, a real state of affairs: one in which the commodification of an ever-greater share of society, a longstanding imperative of capitalist development, was now being accomplished by the translation of an ever-greater share of society into exchangeable packets of digital information. The Great Recession revealed that even recent efforts to revive “the ownership society” had rested more on speculative information flows than on concrete foundations.[10]

Against this socio-economic backdrop, the substitution of constitutional formalism for more deeply-rooted, extra-constitutional coordinating mechanisms makes a good deal of sense. On the one hand, the premise that growing social fragmentation, alienation, and enmity can be resolved by recourse to constitutional text and principle is obviously false. On the other hand, the commitment to constitutional text and principle offers an at-least-rhetorically democratic gloss on the increasingly thin ties that do still bind together American society: the relatively equal right to buy and sell labor power; the relatively equal capacity to access the digital pubic sphere (and to have one’s ideas and desires commodified in doing so). In this way, constitutional formalism connects the lived reality of informational capitalism to the old fantasy of democratic participation and control. Unlike earlier extra-constitutional auxiliaries, constitutional formalism tends to exacerbate rather than mitigate social rivalry, reflecting the ceaseless and mistrustful churn of a society submerged by the market. Yet, at least for the time being, constitutional formalism serves to bless this state of affairs as a democratic work-in-progress rather than a moral cataclysm. Perhaps that is functional enough for the purposes of capitalist development, the trajectory of which appears to lie beyond American shores and their ostensibly democratic horizon altogether.[11] 

            Conclusion 

If this Response takes Skowronek to task for neglecting the material foundations of American constitutional development, its focus on those foundations can itself be taken to task for yielding no prescriptions half as plausible as Skowronek’s own. As Skowronek notes, there are indeed institutional rivals to constitutional formalism, including a formally exclusionary populism (pp. 232-233), a more inclusive majoritarianism grounded in the recovery of legislative and administrative flexibility, and a substantively ambiguous revival of natural law as the basis of constitutional government.[12] Perhaps the fact that each of these alternatives enjoys only a modest social base can compel investment in “alternative means of interpersonal communication” and “new forms of social capital” that will, eventually, undergird a more durable constitutional settlement (p. 235). Given that such investment is consistent with the logic of informational capitalism itself, Skowronek’s vision of a path forward is certainly plausible. Yet that very plausibility may indicate a political cul-de-sac. If what Skowronek calls the “constructive social sensorium” (p. 236) is little more than the institutional reflection of the trajectory of capitalist development, it would be understandable if many Americans no longer wished to dwell within it.

Jeremy Kessler is the Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He can be reached at jkessler@law.columbia.edu.

Was bisher geschah

Verboten ist exekutiver Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat sowieso. Denn er verletzt nicht nur das Rechtsstaats-, sondern auch das Gewaltenteilungsprinzip und die verfassungsrechtliche Garantie effektiven Rechtsschutzes. Es gibt derzeit jedoch kaum wirksame Mittel, um solche Verstöße zu verhindern oder zu beseitigen. In vielen Fällen verhängen Gerichte nur ein einmaliges Zwangsgeld von höchstens 10.000 Euro, das ein verurteiltes Land von einem seiner Konten auf ein anderes seiner Konten zahlt – von der rechten in die linke Tasche. Beugewirkung? Fehlanzeige.

Hubig ist nicht die Erste, die das ändern möchte. Schon 2022 unternahm der Bundesrat einen ähnlichen Vorstoß und wollte die Vollstreckungsmöglichkeiten gegen die Exekutive verschärfen. Diese Initiative war zwar gut gemeint, aber nicht unbedingt gut gemacht. Der Bundestag befasste sich damit nicht weiter. Stattdessen legte der damalige Bundesjustizminister Buschmann im Juni 2024 einen Gegenvorschlag vor, der wenige Monate später dem Ampel-Aus zum Opfer fiel.

Weshalb die Zeit drängt

Jetzt ist es allerhöchste Zeit, die Vollstreckungsregeln zu überarbeiten. Denn bisher ist die Zahl von Fällen exekutiven Ungehorsams noch nicht ausgeufert. Das liegt vermutlich auch daran, dass bisher an keiner Regierung extremistische Parteien beteiligt sind. Die anstehende Landtagswahl in Sachsen-Anhalt im September macht es jedoch möglich, dass sich das nun sehr bald ändert. Der dortige, als gesichert rechtsextrem eingestufte Landesverband der AfD liegt in Umfragen derzeit mit rund 40 % vorn. Das Problem: Gelangen Kräfte in Regierungsverantwortung, die die Prinzipien der freiheitlichen demokratischen Grundordnung ablehnen, hilft auch eine Kontrolle durch unabhängige Gerichte nicht mehr, wenn sich diese nicht durchsetzen können.

Hubigs Masterplan

Die Gretchenfrage lautet nun, wie effektiv Hubigs neuer Plan die Autorität der Gerichte stärken kann. Der Referentenentwurf sieht im Wesentlichen drei Änderungen zur „Bekämpfung exekutiven Ungehorsams“ vor:

1. Er hebt die maximale Höhe der Zwangsgelder von 10.000 Euro auf 25.000 Euro an.
2. Das Zwangsgeld soll künftig nicht mehr beim selben Hoheitsträger verbleiben, sondern einer anderen deutschen Gebietskörperschaft oder einer gemeinnützigen Einrichtung zufließen.
3. Statt nur einmalig sollen Gerichte das Zwangsgeld künftig auch wiederkehrend anordnen können.

Das sind zweifellos drei Schritte in die richtige Richtung. Die ersten beiden Punkte hatte bereits der Bundesrat vor vier Jahren angeregt. Neu gegenüber der Bundesratsinitiative und ein echter „Gamechanger“ sind jedoch die periodischen Zwangsgelder. Denn die bloße Erhöhung des Einzelbetrags um 15.000 Euro dürfte für einen milliardenschweren Landeshaushalt kaum mehr als ein Tropfen auf den heißen Stein sein. Fällt ein Zwangsgeld dagegen monatlich, wöchentlich oder gar täglich aufs Neue an, steigt der Befolgungsdruck auf die Exekutive mit der Zeit. Hohe Summen können sich schnell aufaddieren. Für die Regierungsebene bedeutet das neben der finanziellen Belastung des Haushalts vor allem einen zunehmenden Rechtfertigungsdruck gegenüber der Opposition im Parlament und der eigenen Wählerschaft. Politisch opportun erscheinende Missachtungen gerichtlicher Entscheidungen dürften damit an Attraktivität verlieren.

Gas und Bremse zugleich

Gleichzeitig sägt der Entwurf jedoch auch am Ast der richterlichen Autorität. Er fügt in § 167 VwGO einen entscheidenden Satz ein: „Gegenüber Amtsträgern, die für den Vollstreckungsschuldner handeln, ist eine Anwendung der §§ 888 und 890 der Zivilprozessordnung unzulässig.“ Was zunächst etwas technisch klingt, bedeutet im Kern: keine Zwangs- oder Beugemaßnahmen gegen Amtsträger. Damit nimmt der Entwurf den Gerichten ein potenziell extrem wirkungsvolles Vollstreckungsinstrument aus der Hand.

Ob insbesondere eine Zwangshaft gegen Amtsträger nach bisheriger Rechtslage zulässig ist, gehört zu den umstrittensten Fragen des verwaltungsprozessualen Vollstreckungsrechts. Die Gerichte zeigten sich bislang zurückhaltend; zu einer Zwangshaft kam es noch nie. Das Schrifttum hat jedoch gewichtige Argumente für die Zulässigkeit entwickelt: Ein effektiver Rechts- und Grundrechtsschutz gebietet verfassungsrechtlich eine wirkungsvolle Durchsetzung von Gerichtsentscheidungen gegen den Staat. Außerdem sind die Rechtsgrundlagen hinreichend bestimmt und die Durchsetzung belastet die Funktionsfähigkeit der Exekutive nicht unverhältnismäßig.

Der Reformentwurf schließt die Vollstreckung gegen Amtsträger nun aber aus und begründet dies damit, dass die Pflichterfüllung häufig nicht allein vom Willen eines einzelnen Amtsträgers abhänge (S. 98). Das überzeugt nur vordergründig. Auf der Ebene eines Regierungsinspektors oder Regierungsrats mag dieses Argument tragen. Verwaltungsbeamt:innen ohne Führungsfunktion darf man nicht zu Adressat:innen vollstreckungsrechtlicher Zwangsmaßnahmen machen.

Das stand aber ohnehin nie ernsthaft zur Debatte. Potenzielle Adressatin einer Zwangshaft ist vielmehr die zuständige Behördenleitung, die sehr wohl die für die Pflichterfüllung notwendigen Kompetenzen hat. Nach § 12 Abs. 1 Nr. 4 VwVfG sind Behörden schließlich durch ihre „Leiter“ handlungsfähig. Zudem wendet sich die Verwaltungsprozessordnung an den entscheidenden Stellen direkt an die „Behörde“ (§§ 113 Abs. 1 S. 2, Abs. 2 S. 2, Abs. 5 S. 1, 172 S. 1 VwGO), obwohl in den meisten Fällen ihr Rechtsträger (z. B. ein Bundesland) Beklagter im Verfahren gewesen ist. Meint die zuständige Behördenleitung, sie wäre zwar bereit, das Urteil zu befolgen, ihr seien aber aufgrund einer Weisung die Hände gebunden, bleibt stets eine Exkulpationsmöglichkeit: Beamt:innen können sich von ihrer „vollen persönlichen Verantwortung“ für die Rechtmäßigkeit ihrer dienstlichen Handlungen (§ 36 Abs. 1 BeamtStG) durch eine erfolglose „Remonstration“, also eine Art interne Beschwerde auf dem Dienstweg, befreien (§ 36 Abs. 2 S. 2 BeamtStG). In diesen Fällen wird dann die anweisende Stelle zur möglichen Adressatin der Zwangshaft.

Sinn und Unsinn des ZPO-Verweises

Geht es um die Vollstreckung von Handlungs-, Duldungs- oder Unterlassungspflichten von Behörden, ist ein Rückgriff auf die Zivilprozessordnung (und damit auch auf die Vorschriften zur Zwangs- und Ordnungshaft) über den Generalverweis in § 167 VwGO ohnehin zunächst gesperrt. Denn § 172 VwGO ist als speziellere Regelung für diese Fälle grundsätzlich vorrangig. Das Bundesverfassungsgericht stellte allerdings bereits 1999 klar, dass dennoch eine Anwendung der ZPO möglich bleibt. Hierfür muss klar erkennbar sein, dass die Behörde unter dem Druck des VwGO-Zwangsgeldes nicht einlenkt. Aus dieser Rechtsprechung lässt sich bislang ein Stufensystem der Vollstreckung ableiten:

1. Das mildeste Vollstreckungsmittel sind Zwangsgelder von bis zu 10.000 Euro nach § 172 VwGO.
2. Auf der nächsten Stufe stehen vor allem Zwangsgelder nach der ZPO, die sich auf maximal 25.000 Euro belaufen können.
3. Als ultima ratio kommt schließlich (richtigerweise) die Zwangshaft in Betracht.

Der Referentenentwurf hebt nun die erste Stufe auf das Niveau der ZPO-Zwangsgelder an (25.000 Euro) und streicht die letzte Stufe ersatzlos (keine Zwangshaft). Übrig bleibt im Wesentlichen eine Einheitsstufe. Nur begrenzten Mehrwert verspricht deshalb der neue ausdrückliche Verweis in § 172 Abs. 4 VwGO-RefE, der die Rechtsprechung des Bundesverfassungsgerichts aus dem Jahr 1999 festschreiben und einen Rückgriff auf die ZPO für Fälle hartnäckigen Ungehorsams weiterhin ermöglichen soll.

Gegenüber dem Referentenentwurf der VwGO bietet die ZPO nämlich lediglich die zusätzliche Möglichkeit, bestimmte Handlungen zu ersetzen – etwa durch sog. Ersatzvornahmen oder Besitzeinweisungen. Das kann zwar sehr effektiv sein. Ob solche Ersetzungen überhaupt in Betracht kommen, hängt jedoch stark vom Einzelfall ab. Etwa der Erlass eines Verwaltungsakts oder eines Luftreinhalteplans, zu dem eine Behörde verpflichtet wurde, sind unvertretbare Handlungen, die nicht durch Dritte substituiert werden können. Selbst bei beharrlichster Verweigerung bliebe es in solchen Fällen also beim Zwangsgeld.

Die vergessene Idee des Bundesrats

Überhaupt keine Lösung bietet der Entwurf für praktisch relevante Konstellationen, in denen ein befristetes oder einmaliges Handlungsgebot nicht mehr durchgesetzt werden kann, weil eine Behörde die Unerfüllbarkeit der Verpflichtung (bewusst) herbeigeführt hat. Das betrifft z.B. Stadthallenfälle, in denen es um die terminlich fixierte Überlassung der Räumlichkeiten etwa für einen Parteitag geht. Typisch sind auch hastige Abschiebungen entgegen gerichtlichen Entscheidungen. In solchen Fällen scheidet eine nachträgliche Vollstreckung aus, weil Gerichte die bisher vorhandenen und im Referentenentwurf vorgesehenen Zwangsvollstreckungsmittel nicht mehr einsetzen dürfen, sobald eine Willensbeugung (wegen vollendeter Tatsachen) ausscheidet.

Hier hatte der Bundesrat eine interessante Idee: Mit einem neuen § 172a VwGO sollten die Gerichte die Vollstreckung auch in diesen Fällen fortsetzen können. Diese Idee wurde bereits von der Ampel-Regierung abgelehnt und der Referentenentwurf verwirft sie nun endgültig. § 172 Abs. 2 Satz 3 VwGO-RefE stellt ausdrücklich klar, dass man Zwangsgelder nicht mehr weiter vollstrecken darf, sobald die Erfüllung der Verpflichtung unmöglich geworden ist.

Dogmatisch überzeugte die Idee des Bundesrats tatsächlich nicht. Das Vollstreckungsrecht soll Fehlverhalten nicht bestrafen, sondern den Willen des Schuldners beugen, gerichtliche Entscheidungen zu befolgen. Sobald das nicht mehr möglich ist, lässt sich die Entscheidung eben nicht mehr vollstrecken.

Den Kopf in den Sand zu stecken und für solche Fälle gar keine Lösung anzubieten, ist dennoch keine gute Antwort. Schon aus präventiven Gründen sollte der Gesetzgeber tunlichst vermeiden, renitenten Behörden zu signalisieren, dass er Rechtsbruch mit dem Verzicht auf Vollstreckung belohnt. Der systematisch richtige Hebel für solche Fälle ist der sog. Sekundärrechtsschutz, also insbesondere Schadensersatzansprüche gegen den Staat. Bloß: Im Verwaltungsrecht gibt es oft keinen Vermögensschaden, sondern nur „Schäden“ an verletzten Freiheits- und Gleichheitsrechten. Diese lassen sich meistens nicht in Geld beziffern. Der Gesetzgeber könnte hier mit einer fiktiven Schadensberechnung arbeiten und – ähnlich wie im Immaterialgüterrecht – die Verlustersparnisse des Verletzers abschöpfbar machen. Diese Verlustersparnisse wird es in den genannten Problemkonstellationen oft geben. Denn die Exekutive erspart sich ein bereits angedrohtes Zwangsgeld, indem sie die Unerfüllbarkeit der gerichtlichen Verpflichtung verursacht und man das Zwangsgeld nicht mehr vollstrecken kann.

Damit käme man zu einem ähnlichen Ergebnis wie der Vorschlag des Bundesrats, mit der Ausnahme, dass tatsächlich die Verletzten selbst Geld erhalten würden. Rechtsdogmatisch handelt es sich dabei aber – anders als bei der Idee des Bundesrats – nicht um eine „Bestrafung“ von behördlichem Fehlverhalten, sondern um einen Ausgleich für Rechtsverletzungen auf der Sekundärrechtsebene. Weil es auf dieser Ebene nicht mehr um Willensbeugung geht, greift hier der Einwand nicht, dass ein Wille bei Unmöglichkeit nicht mehr gebeugt werden kann.

Wirkungsvoll und systematisch stimmig ließe sich ein § 172a VwGO etwa so formulieren:

„Verursacht die Behörde in den Fällen des § 172 Absatz 1 Satz 1 nach Androhung des Zwangsgeldes die teilweise oder vollständige Unerfüllbarkeit der sie treffenden Verpflichtung, kann das Gericht den Vollstreckungsschuldner zur Zahlung des bisher angefallenen Zwangsgeldes an den Vollstreckungsgläubiger verurteilen.“

Wie es weitergeht

Mit Blick auf zeitkritische Fälle ist zumindest fraglich, ob die parallelen Reformvorschläge zur Verfahrensbeschleunigung ausreichend Wind in die Segel bringen. Denn Luft zur Verbesserung gibt es reichlich: Die durchschnittliche Verfahrensdauer an Verwaltungsgerichten im „Schlusslicht-Bundesland“ Brandenburg liegt mit 22,4 Monaten bei knapp zwei Jahren. Der Richterbund hält eine nennenswerte Beschleunigung nur mit einer dickeren Personaldecke für möglich.

Auf jeden Fall ist es ein gutes Zeichen, dass wieder Bewegung in die Reformdebatte kommt. Der neue Referentenentwurf hat den Grundstein gelegt. Auf dem Weg bis zur endgültigen Verabschiedung gibt es jetzt noch ausreichend Gelegenheiten, an den Knackpunkten die Weichen richtig zu stellen.

The post Schärfere Schwerter gegen eine zügellose Exekutive appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

The Justices should not buy this novel argument. As Marty Lederman and I explained in this essay, the Government’s domicile theory is unconvincing and riddled with fallacies. Here I will add two simple observations to that analysis.

First, the Government’s domicile theory has essentially been made up for the purposes of this litigation.  For over 125 years, the American law of birthright citizenship has been settled.  Millions of Americans have been recognized as natural-born citizens without anyone questioning that status on the basis of their parents’ domicile. And throughout this litigation, the Government has not pointed to a single judicial decision during that time frame in which anyone was denied U.S. citizenship on this basis.

The most significant scholarship on the history of American citizenship yields a similar lesson. The Government’s domicile theory plays virtually no role in the leading scholarly treatment of the subject, James Kettner’s The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 (1978). The same is true of Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith’s book, Citizenship Without Consent (1985). The first real glimmers of the Government’s domicile theory, as it has now come to be framed, can be found in two student notes published in 2010 and 2015, respectively.  Yet even those articles did not formulate the theory in the way the Government now does.

Second, the SG’s claim that domicile was “central” to the Court’s landmark decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) is an obvious overreach, which cannot be squared with the basic structure and ratio decidendi of that case. To begin with, most of the 22 references to the word “domicile” in Justice Gray’s majority opinion do not, in fact, lend support to the Government’s theory, and many of them directly contradict it.  See, for example, the four uses of that term on pages 656-57 of Gray’s opinion (with respect to Udny v. Udny) and the three uses of the term on page 666 (with respect to the state of European law at the time of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution).

More importantly, none of the seven federal cases (Charming Betsey, Inglis, Shanks, McCreery, Levy, Dred Scott, and Rhodes), four state cases (Gardner, Kilham, Manuel, and Lynch), four executive department opinions (Marcy, Black, and two by Bates), or two commentaries (Kent and Binney) that Justice Gray drew upon in Part III of his opinion (pp. 658-666) to extract the fundamental rule of citizenship that existed before the adoption of the Citizenship Clause in Part IV (pp. 674-675) treated domicile as a necessary condition of birthright citizenship.  Yet the Court in Wong Kim Ark held (pp. 675, 682), and the SG does not dispute, that the Citizenship Clause was designed to incorporate that pre-1866 U.S. rule, and not to deny citizenship to anyone who would have been entitled to it before the Fourteenth Amendment was framed and ratified. As Gray emphasized, the Clause was “not intended to impose any new restrictions upon citizenship, or to prevent any persons from becoming citizens by the fact of birth within the United States who would thereby have become citizens according to the law existing before its adoption” (p. 676). 

On page 34 of its topside brief, the Government quotes from a key paragraph in Wong Kim Ark, in which Gray applied the same fundamental rule to the stipulated facts of the case, including the oft-repeated fact that Wong Kim Ark’s parents were domiciled in the United States at the time of his birth (p. 693; see also pp. 652, 653, 705). But the SG’s brief artfully omits the words that Gray placed at the beginning of that paragraph: “The foregoing considerations and authorities irresistibly lead us to these conclusions.” As indicated, those sources do not connect in any meaningful way with the Government’s domicile theory.  In the sentence immediately following the quoted passage, also missing from the SG’s brief, Gray clarified that the allegiance to which the passage refers is the “temporary and local” allegiance that anyone owes “so long as he remains within our territory.” Furthermore, Gray then confirmed that even non-domiciled aliens are “completely subject to the political jurisdiction” of the United States, drawing upon Daniel Webster’s famous report in Thrasher's Case (p. 693).  Finally, Gray concluded this key paragraph by citing United States v. Carlisle, Calvin’s Case, and specific passages from Hale’s Pleas of the Crown and Blackstone’s Commentaries, none of which lends support to the Government’s domicile theory (pp. 693-94).

In Capital Traction Company v. Hof, 174 US 1, 12 (1899), decided one year after Wong Kim Ark, and also written by Justice Gray, the Court described the ratio decidendi of a case as “the line of thought pervading and controlling the whole opinion.” By that measure, the SG’s contention that domicile was “central” to Wong Kim Ark is a failure. And by that measure, the Executive Order seems clearly unconstitutional.

For the Balkinization symposium on Stephen Skowronek, The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Richard H. Pildes 

            We live in an Era of Democratic Dissatisfaction.  Over the last 10-15 years, large numbers of citizens have been continuously expressing discontent, distrust, alienation, anger and worse with governments across nearly all Western democracies, no matter which parties or coalitions are in power.  One expression of this dissatisfaction is that democratic governments have become more fragile and unstable.  In just the past couple years, the governments in Germany, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Canada have collapsed prematurely, forcing those countries to hold snap elections.  Spain has been forced to hold five general elections in the last ten years, in the search for a stable governing majority; for the same reason, the U.K. held four national elections from 2015-2024 and might well be careening to another one, long before the presumptive five-year term for the current government comes to an end.

            Across nearly all Western democracies, many citizens have come to feel their systems are no longer delivering for them on the issues they care most urgently about.  Four aspects of the way political competition and governance is being transformed as a result illustrate the turbulence of democracy in this era.  First, the traditional center-left and center-right parties that had dominated politics in nearly all these countries since World War II have been collapsing.  When these parties were strong, they were able to form governing majorities either on their own or with one junior partner; as a result, government could more readily deliver on the preferences of electoral majorities.  Second, the voters these parties have been hemorrhaging have moved to insurgent and more extreme parties of the left, right, or more difficult to characterize ideologies.  But it is the new right parties, in particular, that have emerged most significantly as an alternative to the traditional parties and political leaders (the Reform Party in the U.K., the National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany, the Brothers of Italy, the Chega in Portugal, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Finns Party in Finland, the Progress Party in Norway, the Sweden Democrats, and others).  Across 27 European countries, these new right parties barely registered in 2010, but remarkably now in the aggregate attract the same vote share as the traditional center-left and center-right parties.

            Third, young voters are particularly dissatisfied with democratic governments across nearly all these countries.  In many countries, these new right parties are the most popular among younger voters; where they are the second most popular, it is more extreme parties of the left that draw the most support among younger voters.  Fourth, party politics throughout the West had undergone the greatest realignment since World War II, as issues of what we might call national identity have become as important or even more so than economic ones, with working-class voters becoming the base of parties on the right, while the parties of the left have become the province of more highly educated, wealthier voters.  I have chronicled these developments in The Decline of Political Authority:  Legal and Political Challenges in Western Democracies, 2015-2025 and Political Fragmentation in the Democracies of the West.

            Steve Skowronek’s intriguing and masterful book, The Adaptability Paradox, focuses on the challenges to American democracy in this era.  He doesn’t spend a lot of time defining those challenges but nods to factors such as extreme polarization, the breakdown of long-standing norms of governance, and a general sense of broad dissatisfaction with government’s seeming inability to deliver effective responses on the major economic and cultural issues roiling the nation. 

In his “historical-structural” approach, he argues that the challenge American government has faced perennially is the need to adapt to the ever increasing demands of an expanding electorate, in the face of a rigid Constitution whose formal institutional structures of governance have not changed and cannot easily be changed.  In the past, he argues, that challenge has been met through extra-constitutional adaptations:  in the 19^th century, the rise of mass political parties that integrated voter demands into a responsive government, and in the 20^th century, the emergence of the administrative state, which Steve argues did the same.  His animating concern is that, in the era of full democratic inclusion that began with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the rights revolution of that era more generally, we might no longer have the ability to innovate new structures – absent a new Constitution altogether -- to enable effective government that can also elicit broad consensus. 

            Steve’s book fundamentally raises the question of the relationship between institutional structures and political culture.  How much is our unique institutional architecture of governance, which the Constitution birthed, a major cause of the democratic dissatisfaction that exists today; if we could just change those structures or invent some new mode of organizing the effective expression of today’s democratic demands, would we find the consensus Steve seeks?  Or does our toxic, tribalistic politics and dysfunctional political process reflect profound cultural and political divisions and conflict that makes illusory the hope that there is some mode of “adapting” governance that would overcome these divisions.  Steve’s conditions for successful adaptation are stringent:  (1) adaption must satisfy the policy demands of our vast, heterogenous society; (2) maintain fidelity with the underlying “principles” of the Constitution; (3) generate widespread social buy-in.

            Yet America politics over this past 10-15 years strongly resembles politics across most Western democracies.  The same constant turbulence and dissatisfaction has been stirring our politics.  Since 2000, in every election but two, partisan control of the House, the Senate, or the White House has changed hands, with significant likelihood this fall will continue that pattern.  We have never had such an extended period of partisan churn.  That pattern also expresses how sharply and closely divided the country has been over at least the past decade.  Support for the major parties has plummeted; the combined approval rating for the two parties is the lowest ever recorded, while Gallup Polls calls this “The Independent Era” as self-identified independents now constitute over 40% of citizens.  In our two-party system, this dissatisfaction gets expressed through the appeal of outsider candidates, whether Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders (an Independent who nearly unseated the Democratic Party’s most establishment candidate in 2016).  The issues driving the new right parties in Europe have been channeled within the Republican Party, given our two-party system.  The same income and education-based realignment of the parties of the left and right has taken place here.  As in Europe, young voters are particularly attracted to more extreme options, whether the Democratic Socialists of America on the left or the post-liberal visions rising on the right.

            I’m of two minds about the institutions v. culture question Steve’s book raises.  At heart, I’m a scholar of institutions and an institutional designer.  During this period of democratic dissatisfaction in the U.S., I’ve proposed a number of institutional reforms, ranging from the more practical to the less realistic, that I’ve suggested might play a role in Combatting Extremism:  changing the structure of primaries, voting rules, the way we design election districts, campaign finance, or changes to the presidential nominations process.  Others will take Steve’s book as support for more radical structural and institutional changes, such as abandoning the electoral college, changing the structure of the Senate, reducing the role of the Supreme Court, or other proposals.

            On the other hand, I believe democratic dissatisfaction in the U.S. in this era has to be understood in the context of the pervasive dissatisfaction across nearly all Western democracies – regardless of their institutional structure.  The U.K. has about as pure a majoritarian parliamentary system as any major country.  No written constitution, no separation of powers, no meaningful bicameralism.  Yet political alienation there is profound.  Widespread disaffection with the Conservatives led to a Labour landslide in 2024, yet in little time, voters turned so strongly against Labour that its current leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, polls as the least popular British Prime Minister on record.  

The current Fifth French Republic was specifically designed to empower a strong, independently elected President and a strong government.  Its system of two-round elections was chosen to empower electoral majorities, as a rebuke of the Fourth Republic’s proportional-representation system, which was thought to have paralyzed French government.  Yet France is close to ungovernable.  In another variation, Germany uses a mixed-member parliamentary system that ensures proportional representation, with significant power residing in the individual states (the Länder).  The prior, completely dysfunctional government was replaced in 2025; yet since then the Chancellor who had been elected, Friedrich Merz, has suffered the steepest decline in popularity, with his current “favorability” rating plummeting to -48%.

Most democratic governments in the West have been unable during this period to deliver significant economic growth and are riven with conflicts over the rise of national identity issues, including immigration.  The technological revolution constantly disrupts democratic politics and weakens political authority.  Steve Skowronek’s new book teems with arresting insights, but the question whether our current democratic struggles lie in our institutions, or our deeper political culture, remains open.

Mit dem am 6. März im Bundesrat beschlossenen § 87a StGB will die Bundesregierung darauf reagieren. Der neue Straftatbestand verspricht Schutz durch das Strafrecht, bleibt aber weitgehend symbolisch. Für die Betroffenen bleibt die Lage schwierig: Mehr Unterstützung und Beratung bekommen sie nicht. Der neue Tatbestand verfehlt die systemische Dimension des Problems – und spielt damit der Logik der Repression in die Hände.

Transnationale Repression: ein unterschätztes Phänomen

Im Mittelpunkt des neu geschaffenen Tatbestands steht die Strafbarkeit von Fällen sogenannter „transnationaler Repression“. Nach der Definition der G7-Staaten greift ein ausländischer Staat über seine eigenen territorialen Grenzen hinaus, um Personen oder Gruppen zu schikanieren, einzuschüchtern oder anderweitig zu schädigen. Das Ziel ist fast immer gleich: Das Regime will Kritik unterbinden – selbst im vermeintlich sicheren Exil.

Betroffen sind vor allem Oppositionelle, Journalist*innen, Menschenrechtsverteidiger*innen, religiöse Minderheiten und Diasporagruppen. Die Methoden sind dabei ebenso unterschiedlich wie perfide. Sie reichen von körperlicher Gewalt, wie gezielten Auftragsmorden (etwa dem Tiergartenmord) und Entführungen, bis hin zu subtileren, weniger offensichtlichen Einschüchterungsformen. So missbrauchen Staaten etwa Auslieferungsmechanismen wie Interpol oder verweigern konsularische Dienste. Belarus etwa knüpft die Ausstellung notwendiger Passdokumente für deutsche Visa an eine Rückkehr ins Heimatland – und setzt Regimekritiker*innen damit dem Risiko politischer Verfolgung aus.

Auch die digitale Unterdrückung spielt eine immer größere Rolle. Dokumentiert sind Online-Einschüchterung, Diffamierungskampagnen, Phishing und der gezielte Einsatz von Spyware. Dabei instrumentalisieren Akteure häufig das Geschlecht und die sexuelle Orientierung, weshalb marginalisierte Gruppen besonders betroffensind. Darüber hinaus sind auch „mittelbare“ Einschüchterungen bekannt: Hier geraten Familienangehörige im Heimatstaat ins Visier, um Druck auf die Zielperson im Ausland auszuüben. Angesichts dieser zahlreichen Erscheinungsformen spricht Experte Nate Schenkkan bereits vom „goldenen Zeitalter transnationaler Repression“.

Diese Praktiken verletzen zentrale Grund- und Menschenrechte wie die körperliche Unversehrtheit oder die Meinungs- und Versammlungsfreiheit. Das ist besonders bitter, weil viele Betroffene gerade deshalb nach Deutschland kommen, um hier Sicherheit und Freiheit zu finden. Doch die Bekämpfung solcher Übergriffe ist nicht nur eine Frage des individuellen Schutzes: Wenn fremde Staaten sogar auf deutschem Boden Menschen ungehindert verfolgen können, untergräbt das das Vertrauen in den Rechtsstaat insgesamt. Wie effektiv schützt Deutschland die Grundrechte all jener, die hier leben?

Noch immer zu wenig Unterstützung für Betroffene

Zwar will die Bundesregierung transnationaler Repression laut Koalitionsvertrag entschiedener begegnen. So hat das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) eine Hotline eingerichtet und das Auswärtige Amt eine Koordinierungsstelle geschaffen. Zudem steht die Regierung eigenen Angaben zufolge im engen Austausch mit den Strafverfolgungsbehörden, dem Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) und Organisationen von Betroffenen.

Konkrete Unterstützungsangebote sind hieraus aber nicht hervorgegangen. Schon bei der Hotline ist fraglich, ob diese für Betroffene überhaupt ausreichend zugänglich ist: Zwar gibt es auf der Website entsprechende Flyer in mehreren Sprachen, doch die Hotline selbst ist offenbar nur auf Deutsch, Türkisch und Arabisch erreichbar – und das auch nur von montags bis freitags zwischen 9 Uhr und 15 Uhr. Menschenrechtsorganisationen haben zudem darauf hingewiesen, dass Zielpersonen Sicherheitsbehörden zutiefst misstrauen. Wer in seiner Heimat durch Geheimdienste verfolgt wurde, wendet sich in Deutschland nicht ohne Weiteres an das BfV. Und ob die Behörde daneben professionelle psychologische Unterstützung bereitstellen kann, ist mehr als zweifelhaft.

Im bisherigen „Werkzeugkasten“ der Bundesregierung fehlt außerdem eine dezidierte Einbeziehung des Bundesamtes für Migration und Flüchtlinge. Gerade die aufenthaltsrechtliche Dimension spielt bei der Bekämpfung transnationaler Repression eine Schlüsselrolle, etwa wenn ausländische Konsulate Dokumente verweigern, um Druck auszuüben, oder wenn Risikolagen im aufenthaltsrechtlichen Verfahren unerkannt bleiben. Darüber hinaus mangelt es in Deutschland an speziellen Trainingsprogrammen für Staatsbedienstete, damit diese die Muster transnationaler Repression überhaupt erkennen. Auch klare Leitlinien für Betroffene, wie sie etwa im Vereinigten Königreich existieren, sucht man hierzulande vergebens.

Der neue Straftatbestand verfehlt das Ziel

Was ändert der § 87a StGB an diesen Problemen? Die kurze Antwort: nichts.

Erstens liegt das an den materiell-rechtlichen Schwächen des neuen Tatbestands, wie Mark Zöller bereits auf dem Verfassungsblog erläutert hat: Die Norm schließt keine Strafbarkeitslücken, sondern etikettiert lediglich Handlungen um, die ohnehin schon strafbar sind – nur weil sie im Auftrag eines fremden Staates begangen werden. Durch die Subsidiaritätsklausel führt der neue Tatbestand zudem zu einer mehr oder weniger versteckten Straferhöhung bei Delikten mit geringerer Strafandrohung als fünf Jahren Freiheitsstrafe, wie Hausfriedensbruch oder einfache Sachbeschädigungen. Bei schweren Verbrechen wie Auftragsmorden erhöht sich die Strafe hingegen nicht.

Zweitens scheitert die Bekämpfung transnationaler Repression regelmäßig an der Aufklärung, nicht an den strafgesetzlichen Lücken. Das eigentliche Problem liegt darin, dass Betroffene und Strafverfolgungsbehörden den politischen Hintergrund einer Tat oft nicht rechtzeitig erkennen oder Taten aus Angst gar nicht erst anzeigen. Hier helfen keine neuen Strafnormen, sondern nur Schulung, Aufklärung und effektive Unterstützung.

Drittens droht § 87a StGB die falschen Akteure zu treffen. Denn in manchen Fällen instrumentalisieren Heimatstaaten die unmittelbaren Täter und machen sie so zu Opfern oder zumindest zu unbedarften Werkzeugen transnationaler Repression. Nicht immer können diese nämlich erkennen, dass sie eigentlich von einem fremden Staat angeworben werden und es sich bei der vermeintlich ‚harmlosen‘ Sachbeschädigung eigentlich schon um Sabotage handelt. Von derartigen Konstellationen gehen offenbar auch das BfV und das BKA aus, warnen sie doch durch Informationskampagnen wie „Kein Wegwerf-Agent werden“ gerade vorniedrigschwelliger Anwerbung über Social Media. Ohnehin ist fraglich, ob die Bestrafung „kleiner Fische“ die dahinterstehenden Staaten überhaupt beeindruckt. Denn die neue Regelung bestraft die Ausführenden der Tat und nicht die Staaten selbst.

Viertens erweitert § 87a StGB „durch die Hintertür“ die Telekommunikationsüberwachung. Weil § 100 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 lit. a) StPO auf die Staatsschutzdelikte der §§ 87 bis 89a StGB verweist, wird § 87a StGB „automatisch“zur Anlasstat für Überwachungsmaßnahmen. Die Folge: Auch ohne Wissen der Betroffenen dürfen Strafverfolgungsbehörden deren Telekommunikation überwachen und aufzeichnen. Das mag bei einer Agententätigkeit zu Sabotagezwecken gemäß § 87 StGB noch verhältnismäßig sein – ist bei einer Sachbeschädigung mit schwer nachweisbarem Motiv rechtsstaatlich aber höchst bedenklich.

Gefahr der Versicherheitlichung

Indem die Bundesregierung auf Strafe statt Schutz setzt, spielt sie der Logik der Repression unfreiwillig in die Hände: Anstatt Grund- und Menschenrechte aktiv zu stärken, reagiert sie auf Repression lediglich mit staatlichem Zwang. Das mag psychologisch verständlich und sicherheitspolitisch bisweilen geboten sein. Schließlich verletzt transnationale Repression nicht nur Individualrechte, sondern auch die staatliche Souveränität. Nur darf dies nicht dazu verleiten, transnationaler Repression mit „Versicherheitlichung“(securitization) zu begegnen.

Hinter diesem Begriff steht eine riskante politische Strategie: Unter dem Verweis auf eine Bedrohungslage werden rechtsstaatliche Standards aufgeweicht oder demokratische Regeln umgangen. In letzter Konsequenz führt dieses Vorgehen dazu, dass staatliche Akteure grundlegende Verfahrensprinzipien missachten, Verantwortlichkeiten verschleiern und Feindbilder zementieren. Der wirksame Kampf gegen repressive Methoden kann aber nur darin bestehen, Demokratie und Rechtsstaatlichkeit zu festigen, statt sie auszuhöhlen. Andernfalls laufen demokratische Staaten Gefahr, selbst Maßnahmen anzuwenden, die man sonst autoritären Regimen zuschreibt.

Die spezifische Stoßrichtung des § 87a StGB muss hier nachdenklich stimmen. Auch die Einfügung des Tatbestands in letzter Sekunde und ohne ausreichende Anhörung von Sachverständigen nährt Zweifel an der Sorgfalt der Legislative.

Falscher Schwerpunkt angesichts komplizierter Bedrohungslage

Die Einwände gegen § 87a StGB verkennen nicht, wie anspruchsvoll die effektive Bekämpfung transnationaler Repression in der Praxis ist. Das Phänomen ist vielschichtig, betrifft zahlreiche Rechtsgebiete und entzieht sich oft einer klaren statistischen Erfassung. Nichtregierungsorganisationen suchen zwar den Kontakt mit Betroffenen, konzentrieren sich aber meist auf spezifische Regionen oder Gruppen. Auch die Geheimdienste können – aus guten rechtsstaatlichen Gründen – Informationen nur begrenzt austauschen.

Gerade wegen dieser Komplexität müsste Deutschland aber seine Schutzpflichten und Verantwortlichkeiten ernster nehmen und den Schutz der Betroffenen konsequent in den Mittelpunkt stellen. Dazu gehört zweifellos eine effektive Strafverfolgung. Wichtig sind in erster Linie aber die Bereitstellung von psychologischer und rechtlicher Unterstützung, die Schulung von Staatsbediensteten, die Verbesserung spezifischer Schutzmechanismen und der intensive Austausch mit Betroffenen. Nur so können wir adäquat auf deren Bedürfnisse eingehen, einen Umgang mit Rechtsverletzungen finden und diese – im besten Fall – verhindern.

Diskutiert wird in diesem Zusammenhang beispielsweise ein zentraler Kontaktpunkt, an den sich Betroffene wenden können und der gleichzeitig – neben der rechtlichen und psychologischen Beratung – wertvolle Informationen über Erscheinungsformen transnationaler Repression sammeln könnte. Aber ganz gleich, welchen Weg Deutschland einschlägt: Transnationale Repression ist eine mehrdimensionale Herausforderung. Täter strafrechtlich zur Rechenschaft zu ziehen, ist bestenfalls ein Teil der Antwort. Die Bestrafung der Täter kann aber, wenn sie denn überhaupt gelingt, den Schutz der Betroffenen nicht ersetzen.

The post Strafe statt Schutz appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Der Schritt in frei zugängliche Online-Datenräume

Bislang verwenden die deutschen Strafverfolgungsbehörden zur Gesichtserkennung das beim BKA zentral angesiedelte Gesichtserkennungssystem GES, um unbekannte Verdächtige anhand der Datenbank INPOL-Z zu identifizieren (– allerdings auch dies ohne taugliche Rechtsgrundlage, dazu näher Hahn, Automatisierte Gesichtserkennung in der Strafverfolgung, 2025, S. 213 ff.). Dort sind rund 7,6 Millionen Lichtbilder recherchefähig gespeichert – Bilder von Verurteilten, Verdächtigten, Personen aus Gefahrenabwehrdatenbanken sowie allen Asylsuchenden. Bislang werden die Ergebnisse der Suchanfragen von menschlichen Lichtbildexperten im 4-Augen-Vergleich überprüft und erst dann an die jeweiligen Ermittler weitergeleitet (zum Ablauf Hahn, Automatisierte Gesichtserkennung in der Strafverfolgung, 2025, S. 66 ff.).

Die Datenbanken kommerzieller Anbieter wie PimEyes (ca. 3 Milliarden Fotos) sind um ein Vielfaches größer und erweitern daher den Kreis an Personen, die identifiziert werden können. Zudem können durch eine biometrische Suche anhand von Internetfotos Hinweise auf den Aufenthaltsort einer Person generiert werden. So war es auch im Fall Klette, in dem Journalisten sie auf einem Foto eines Capoeira-Vereins in Berlin-Kreuzberg entdeckten.

Die Ampel-Koalition unternahm nach der Entdeckung von Klette einen ersten Versuch, eine Rechtsgrundlage für biometrische Abgleiche mit Internetdaten für die Strafverfolgungsbehörden zu schaffen. Dieser scheiterte jedoch im Bundesrat – weil die Maßnahmen „nicht weit genug“ gingen. Nun folgt ein weiterer Anlauf mit einem Referentenentwurf des Bundesministeriums der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz. Den Strafverfolgungsbehörden soll mit einem neu einzuführenden § 98d StPO-E ermöglicht werden, „zur Erforschung des Sachverhalts, zur Identitätsfeststellung oder zur Ermittlung des Aufenthaltsorts des Beschuldigten oder eines Zeugen […] biometrische Daten aus einem Strafverfahren mit im Internet öffentlich zugänglichen biometrischen Daten mittels einer automatisierten Anwendung zur Datenverarbeitung“ abzugleichen. Der Gesetzentwurf sieht dabei gewisse Begrenzungen der Maßnahme und einige Verfahrensvorgaben (z.B. Protokollierungs- und Löschvorschriften) vor. Es bleiben allerdings mehrere Fragezeichen:

Mit welcher Datenbank?

Eine Suche anhand von Gesichts- oder anderen biometrischen Daten setzt den Abgleich mit einer zuvor angelegten Datenbank voraus. Ein unmittelbares „Durchsuchen des Internets“ ist technisch nicht möglich. Biometrische Gesichtserkennung arbeitet nicht mit den Bildern selbst, sondern mit sogenannten „Embeddings“, also numerischen Vektoren zur Repräsentation von Gesichtsmerkmalen. Diese Embeddings werden mithilfe tiefer neuronaler Netze aus den gespeicherten Gesichtsbildern extrahiert und zur Gesichtserkennung abgeglichen (zur Technologie Hahn, Automatisierte Gesichtserkennung in der Strafverfolgung, 2025, S. 49 ff.). Gesichtserkennung ohne eine bestehende Datenbank (an Lichtbildern und ihnen zugeordneten Embeddings) würde bedeuten, für jede neue Suchanfrage „on the fly“ sämtliche zu vergleichenden Bilder (welche?) herunterzuladen und entsprechende Embeddings zu generieren. Das wäre mit einem Ressourcenaufwand verbunden, der weder praktisch noch ökonomisch wäre. Für die Durchführung der in § 98d StPO-E vorgesehenen Ermittlungsmaßnahme ist daher eine bereits vorhandene Abgleichdatenbank erforderlich.

Der häufig gegen die Erstellung einer solchen Datenbank ins Feld geführte Art. 5 Abs. 1 lit. 3 KI-VO steht dem nicht grundsätzlich entgegen. Die Vorschrift untersagt „das Inverkehrbringen, die Inbetriebnahme für diesen spezifischen Zweck oder die Verwendung von KI-Systemen, die Datenbanken zur Gesichtserkennung durch das ungezielte Auslesen von Gesichtsbildern aus dem Internet oder von Überwachungsaufnahmen erstellen oder erweitern“. Erfasst sind jedoch nur Datenbanken, die mithilfe von KI-Systemengeneriert werden. Die Definition eines KI-Systems in der KI-Verordnung ist zwar weit (vgl. Art. 3 Nr. 1 KI-VO), dennoch können solche Datenbanken auch mit eindeutig nicht KI-basierter Software erstellt werden. Typischerweise kommen hierfür sogenannte Crawler zum Einsatz, die automatisiert öffentlich zugängliche Inhalte, insbesondere Bilder, erfassen, speichern und in Datenbanken ablegen. Ein KI-System liegt nach der KI-Verordnung nur vor, wenn ein Programm nach Inbetriebnahme „anpassungsfähig sein kann“. Dies ist etwa der Fall, wenn Methoden des maschinellen Lernens zur Bestimmung seines Verhaltens eingesetzt werden. Beruht der Crawler hingegen auf fest vorgegebenen, menschlich definierten Algorithmen, fehlt es an dieser Anpassungsfähigkeit. In diesem Fall liegt kein KI-System vor, sodass das Verbot des Art. 5 Abs. 1 lit. 3 KI-VO nicht eingreift.

Es stellt sich allerdings dennoch die Frage, welche Datenbank für den biometrischen Abgleich herangezogen werden soll und woher die entsprechenden Online-Datensätze kommen. Das Erheben und Speichern dieser Abgleichdaten von Unbeteiligten sind – neben der Verwendung, die § 98d StPO-E regeln soll – eigenständige Grundrechtseingriffe (vgl. nur BVerfGE 100, 313 (366 f.); 130, 151 (184); stRspr). Die Errichtung einer (polizeieigenen) Datenbank setzt daher eine eigene Rechtsgrundlage voraus (vgl. auch Golla, Die kriminalbehördliche Informationsordnung, 2024, S. 90 ff.), die u.a. die rechtlichen Voraussetzungen für die Speicherung in der Datenbank und Rechtsschutzmöglichkeiten regelt.

Der Gesetzentwurf sieht in seiner Begründung jedoch vor, dass eine „dauerhafte Datenbank“ nicht erstellt werden soll und dass die bei Durchführung des Abgleichs erhobenen und verwendeten Daten unverzüglich zu löschen seien (S. 13). Den wenig ressourceneffizienten Weg einer „on the fly“-Gesichtserkennung werden die Behörden in der Praxis aber wohl nicht gehen. Denn der Entwurf sieht selbst „für den Fall, dass die Strafverfolgungsbehörden den Abgleich technisch nicht selbst durchführen können“ die Inanspruchnahme eines „Anbieters im Ausland“ vor. Welche Anbieter damit konkret gemeint sind, bleibt jedoch unklar. Die kommerziellen Anbieter mit Datensätzen in relevanter Größenordnung – etwa PimEyes (3 Milliarden Fotos) oder Clearview AI (70 Milliarden Fotos) beruhen auf rechtswidrigen Praktiken, die insbesondere gegen die DSGVO verstoßen.

Mit welchem technischen System?

Es stellt sich außerdem die Frage, welche biometrischen Erkennungssysteme (mit welchen Algorithmen? Von welchem Hersteller?) verwendet werden sollen und dürfen. § 98d StPO-E ermöglicht einen Abgleich biometrischer Daten „mittels einer automatisierten Anwendung zur Datenverarbeitung“. Damit dürften insbesondere KI-basierte Anwendungen gemeint sein, denn nach dem Stand der Technik basieren alle leistungsfähigen biometrischen Erkennungssysteme heute auf Verfahren des Deep Learning und damit auf Methoden der künstlichen Intelligenz. Diese haben in den vergangenen Jahren erhebliche Leistungsfortschritte erzielt, sodass jedenfalls die besten Algorithmen inzwischen in den unabhängigen Tests des US-amerikanischen National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) „fast perfekte“ („near-perfect“) Erkennungsleistungen erreichen.

Solche Testergebnisse müssen aber kritisch eingeordnet werden. Zunächst unterscheiden sich die verschiedenen Systeme erheblich in ihrer Leistungsfähigkeit. Außerdem werden solche hervorragenden Ergebnisse regelmäßig unter kontrollierten Testbedingungen erzielt (ausreichende Qualität, günstige Aufnahmewinkel und Beleuchtung der Bilder); die tatsächliche Erkennungsleistung kann im praktischen Einsatz deutlich geringer ausfallen und hängt u.a. ab von der Qualität der Such- und Abgleichdaten (eher ungünstig: verschwommene Aufnahme einer Überwachungskamera von schräg oben), von Veränderungen des Erscheinungsbildes (großer zeitlicher Abstand zwischen Such- und Abgleichbild) sowie von der Größe der Abgleichdatenbank (je größer, desto wahrscheinlicher sind dort viele Personen mit ähnlicher Merkmalsausprägung). Und selbst bei Systemen mit geringen Fehlerraten bleiben Fehlidentifizierungen bei großen Datenbeständen ein praktisches Problem, da sich auch niedrige Falsch-Positiv-Raten in absoluten Zahlen erheblich auswirken (0,1 % falsch-positive Treffer bei 10 Millionen Fotos ergeben statistisch 10.000 fehlerhafte Treffer).

Dem kann zwar teilweise durch eine sachverständige menschliche Kontrolle der Treffer begegnet werden (dazu sogleich). Sichergestellt sein müsste jedoch zunächst, dass überhaupt nur biometrische Erkennungssysteme eingesetzt werden, die dem jeweils neusten Stand der Technik entsprechen und innerhalb dieses Standards zu den leistungsfähigsten verfügbaren Systemen zählen.

§ 98d StPO-E enthält aber keine konkreten Vorgaben für die Leistungsfähigkeit der eingesetzten Systeme. Die KI-Verordnung gilt zwar unmittelbar (auch) für biometrische Erkennungssysteme, die die Polizei einsetzt und stellt Anforderungen an die Zuverlässigkeit solcher Systeme. Ihre Vorgaben reichen aber nicht aus, denn sie beschränkt sich darauf, ein lediglich unbestimmt formuliertes „angemessenes Maß“ an Genauigkeit zu verlangen (Art. 15 Abs. 1 KI-VO). Im grundrechtssensiblen Bereich der Strafverfolgung kann dies ersichtlich nicht genügen und führt auch direkt zu einer weiteren Problematik des Gesetzentwurfs:

Wer überprüft die Treffer?

Die Frage, wer die Technologie überhaupt anwendet, ist zentral. Denn der biometrische Abgleich – also die Identifizierung oder Lokalisierung von Personen oder die Ermittlung weiterer Informationen – bildet lediglich den Ausgangspunkt. Anschließend muss das Ergebnis eingeordnet und darüber entschieden werden, ob darauf gestützt grundrechtseingreifende Maßnahmen gegen die identifizierten Personen ergriffen werden.

„Entscheidungen im Strafverfahren dürfen immer nur von Menschen getroffen werden – nicht von KI-Agenten.“, so Bundesjustizministerin Hubig in diesem Zusammenhang. Der Gesetzentwurf beansprucht dies zu gewährleisten, lässt aber offen, wie genau dies geschehen soll. § 98d StPO-E enthält insbesondere keine Anforderungen an die fachliche Qualifikation der Anwender und ermöglicht damit auch nicht speziell geschulten Polizeibeamten die Durchführung biometrischer Abgleiche. Gerade diese können aber die vom System generierten „Treffer“ mangels eigener Expertise im morphologischen Gesichtsvergleich regelmäßig nicht fundiert überprüfen. Es besteht daher die Gefahr, dass auf den ersten Blick plausibel erscheinende Ergebnisse ungeprüft übernommen werden.

Dies liefe im Übrigen in vielen Fällen auch Art. 26 Abs. 10 UAbs. 3 S. 2 KI-VO zuwider, der verlangt, dass „Strafverfolgungsbehörden keine ausschließlich auf der Grundlage der Ausgabe solcher Systeme zur nachträglichen biometrischen Fernidentifizierung beruhende Entscheidung, aus der sich eine nachteilige Rechtsfolge für eine Person ergibt, treffen“. Kann aber der Anwender den „Treffer“ (also die Ausgabe des biometrischen Fernidentifizierungssystems) mangels entsprechender Expertise nicht wirksam überprüfen, dann kann er gar nicht anders, als Entscheidungen faktisch allein auf Basis dieser Ausgabe zu treffen.

Sinnvoll wäre es, in der Rechtsgrundlage des § 98d StPO-E den Einsatz biometrischer Erkennungssysteme auf entsprechend geschulte Personen zu beschränken, für den Bereich Gesichtserkennung etwa auf beim Bundeskriminalamt ausgebildete Lichtbildexperten oder andere Lichtbildsachverständige. Nur so lassen sich die Treffer sachkundig überprüfen und Fehlidentifizierungen – und damit Ermittlungen gegen Unbeteiligte – wirksam reduzieren.

Auch hier reichen die Vorgaben der KI-Verordnung nicht aus, denn sie bleiben insoweit zu unbestimmt. Zwar ergibt sich aus Art. 14 Abs. 5 KI-VO, dass Ergebnisse von Systemen zur nachträglichen biometrischen Fernidentifizierung von „mindestens zwei natürlichen Personen, die die notwendige Kompetenz, Ausbildung und Befugnis besitzen, getrennt überprüft und bestätigt“ werden sollen. Diese Vorgabe richtet sich jedoch nicht als unmittelbar verbindliche Verfahrensanforderung an die Anwender (oder die Strafverfolgungsbehörde oder den nationalen Gesetzgeber), sondern als Ausgestaltungs- bzw. Designvorgabe an die Anbieter von KI-Systemen (vgl. auch Art. 16 lit. a KI-VO).

Wo sind die Grenzen?

Der vorgeschlagenen Rechtsgrundlage fehlt außerdem in einigen zentralen Fragen eine wirkungsvolle Begrenzung der neuen Ermittlungsmaßnahme. Zwei Beispiele:

Im Gegensatz zu dem ursprünglichen Entwurf der Ampel-Koalition soll ein Abgleich biometrischer Daten nicht nur zur Identitätsermittlung oder zur Ermittlung des Aufenthaltsorts zulässig sein, sondern auch zur „Erforschung des Sachverhalts“. Das bedeutet, dass biometrische Erkennungssysteme auch eingesetzt werden können, um anhand von Internetdaten weitere Informationen über verdächtige Personen zu gewinnen, etwa zu ihren Eigenschaften, Vorlieben oder ihrem Bekannten- und Freundeskreis. Dadurch lassen sich weitreichende Erkenntnisse über eine Person gewinnen, die auch Rückschlüsse auf ihr Inneres – und den Kernbereich ihrer Persönlichkeit – sowie die Erstellung von Persönlichkeitsprofilen ermöglichen können. Dabei kommt es nach der Rechtsprechung des Bundesverfassungsgerichts gerade nicht darauf an, ob die Informationen tatsächlich verknüpft oder Persönlichkeits- und Bewegungsprofile erstellt werden. Entscheidend ist vielmehr, dass dies durch die Maßnahme möglich wäre (vgl. etwa BVerfGE 125, 260 (292)). Es wäre daher angezeigt, eine Regelung zum Kernbereichsschutz zu treffen (etwa durch Verweis auf § 100d StPO) bzw. ein ausdrückliches Verbot der Erstellung von Persönlichkeitsprofilen zu regeln (in diese Richtung etwa § 14a Abs. 2 S. 5 HSOG, Art. 39 Abs. 3 S. 2 BayPAG).

Unklar bleibt auch, ob mit „biometrischen Daten“ ausschließlich auf das tatsächliche äußere Erscheinungsbild (etwa das reale Gesicht) bzw. die echte Stimme des Verdächtigen oder Zeugen Bezug genommen wird. In der Praxis gewinnt die Suche mit künstlich veränderten oder generierten Darstellungen, etwa in Form künstlich gealterter Gesichter oder synthetischer (Phantom-)Bilder, zunehmend an Bedeutung. Zwar kann hierdurch der Kreis potenziell identifizierbarer Personen erweitert werden, zugleich steigt jedoch die Fehleranfälligkeit der Maßnahme (vgl. dazu auch Hahn, Automatisierte Gesichtserkennung in der Strafverfolgung, 2025, S. 267 f.). Eine Regelung dazu, ob und in welchem Umfang derartige Verfahren zulässig sind, enthält die Rechtsgrundlage nicht.

Aber warum dürfen das denn jetzt die Journalisten?

Noch ein Wort zur verbreiteten Kritik à la „Die Idee kann nicht sein, dass Polizei nicht das tun darf, was zum Beispiel Journalisten tun dürfen“: Es ist keineswegs klar, dass Journalisten Fotos von Personen in kommerzielle Gesichtserkennungs-Suchmaschinen hochladen „dürfen“.

Die Verarbeitung biometrischer Daten ist nach Art. 9 Abs. 1 DSGVO grundsätzlich verboten. Mangels einer ausdrücklichen Einwilligung der Betroffenen (Art. 9 Abs. 2 lit. a DSGVO) kommt nur die Ausnahme des Art. 9 Abs. 2 lit. e DSGVO in Betracht. Danach dürfen biometrische Daten ausnahmsweise verarbeitet werden, wenn die betroffene Person diese Daten selbst „offensichtlich öffentlich gemacht“ hat. Voraussetzung ist jedoch, dass die betroffene Person die sensiblen Daten selbst und bewusst veröffentlicht hat. Dies ist beispielsweise nicht der Fall, wenn Dritte Fotos von einer öffentlichen Veranstaltung hochladen, auf denen die Person zu sehen ist. Auch bei vom Nutzer selbst hochgeladenen Fotos ist die Rechtslage unklar. Denn biometrische Daten sind streng genommen nicht das Gesichtsbild selbst, sondern die daraus gewonnenen Face Embeddings (vgl. Art. 4 Nr. 14 DSGVO). Dass solche selbst hochgeladenen „Selfies“ (bzw. die daraus generierten Face Embeddings) von Dritten für eine Gesichtserkennungssuche genutzt werden, brauchen Nutzer in der Regel nicht zu erwarten, zumal die meisten Social-Media-Anbieter eine solche Nutzung ausdrücklich verbieten. Journalisten (und andere Private) dürfen daher nicht „einfach so“ das Gesichtsbild eines Dritten in einer kommerziellen Gesichtserkennungssoftware wie PimEyes hochladen. (Soweit man für die Gesichtserkennungssuche Art. 85 Abs. 2 DSGVO für einschlägig hält, stellen sich vergleichbare Probleme im Hinblick auf das allgemeine Persönlichkeitsrecht.)

Im Übrigen verstößt ein Journalist auch gegen die Nutzungsbedingungen (Terms of Service) von PimEyes, wenn er mit dem Foto einer anderen Person eine Gesichtserkennungssuche vornimmt. Mit den Worten von PimEyes selbst: „Pursuant to our Terms of Service, any search pertaining to other individuals is strictly prohibited.“

Es stellt sich dann allerdings die Frage, für wen PimEyes Pro-Versionen anbietet, mit denen für monatlich 37,99 Euro bis zu 100 Suchanfragen pro Tag durchgeführt werden können…

The post „Aber die Journalisten dürfen das doch auch“ appeared first on Verfassungsblog.