28th October 2019

Speaker: Manuel Campos Sánchez-Bordona, General Counsel of the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Moderator: Joaquín Huelin, Partner, Cuatrecasas. Member of the Academic Council of Fide

Summary:

The judicial activity of the CJEU has been deployed mainly, during 2018 and in the course of 2019, in the areas of prosecution that could be classified as “ordinary”: the freedom of movement of people, goods, services and capital; border control, asylum and immigration; judicial cooperation in civil and criminal matters; defense of competition; intellectual and industrial property rights; the protection of personal data; public sector contracts; the transports; indirect taxation (VAT); social protection; consumer rights or the environment.

However, new jurisprudential developments emerge in matters that, until a few years ago, barely had access to the CJEU. These include, for example, those concerning the withdrawal of a Member State (Case C-621/18, of undoubted institutional relevance); the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union to relations between individuals (case C569 / 16); to monetary policy or to the banking union (Case C-219/17).

From another perspective, some decisions of the CJEU on the application of national law have opted for solutions that were hardly imaginable before, such as the direct annulment of a decision adopted by the national authorities (cases C-202/18 and C-238/18) or the precautionary measure, addressed to a Member State, to suspend the application of its internal rules on judicial organization (Case C-619/18).

Given this situation, it seems appropriate to review and reflect together on the direction that the CJEU jurisprudence is taking in recent years.

November 6th 2019

Speakers:

• Algeria Queralt, Serra Hunter Associate Professor of Constitutional Law, Faculty of Law, University of Barcelona
• Fabio Easter, Professor of Administrative Law, UCM. Court lawyer and expert in European electoral law

Moderator: Daniel Sarmiento, Professor, Complutense University of Madrid. Counsel, Uria Menendez. Member of the Academic Council of Fide and Mariano Bacigalupo, Professor of Administrative Law at the UNED and Director of the CNMC, member of the Academic Council of Fide.

Summary:

This session dealt with the complex issue of the status of MEPs in European Union law and its relationship with the criminal law of the Member States. The last elections to the European Parliament served as an occasion for this delicate issue to be raised in Spain, giving rise to the first preliminary ruling question raised by the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court in the Junqueras case.

In the session, the statute was analyzed from the double perspective of European Law: on the one hand, in the light of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union and, on the other hand, from the perspective of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. Humans, without forgetting the relevance for the caso of the criminal law of the States.