Possibilities of blocking the establishment of a link between the European Union budget and the rule of law Cover Image

Możliwości zablokowania ustanowienia powiązania budżetu Unii Europejskiej z praworządnością
Possibilities of blocking the establishment of a link between the European Union budget and the rule of law

Author(s): Waldemar Gontarski
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Law, Constitution, Jurisprudence, EU-Legislation
Published by: Kancelaria Sejmu
Keywords: rule of law; regime of conditionality; financial interests of the European Union; budget and Next Generation EU; Council Decision on the system of Own Resources of the EU

Summary/Abstract: The new regime of conditionality for the protection of the rule of law, understood as the rule of law (new conditionality), appears to be contrary to the European Union Treaties, in particular because its essential provisions are incompatible with the requirement of legal certainty which underlies the rule of law. This conditionality is based on financial liability for the risk of illegality, that is, in sum, for lawful acts of a Member State which may possibly turn out to be unlawful, but after financial sanctions have already been applied. This publication deals with the identification and management of legal risks that give rise to financial risks. After characterising the basic EU budgetary instruments on the basis of the acquis of economic and legal sciences (which implies the application of the external integration method), using a dogmatic method, the author discusses the possibility of blocking by a Member State the introduction into EU law of a mechanism binding the budget with the broadly understood rule of law in connection with the signalled incompatibilities of the new conditionality mechanism with primary Union law. The aim of the paper is to answer the question of what legal possibilities an individual Member State has to counteract a Union regulation prima facie incompatible with the rule of law, apart from challenging the regulation before the Court of Justice (review of the legality of legal acts), on the assumption that the rule of law imposes an obligation to first counteract bad legislation (decent legislation as an element of the rule of law) and only as a last resort to lodge a complaint with the Court against a given act of derived Union law.

  • Issue Year: 2021
  • Issue No: 5
  • Page Range: 35-54
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: English, Polish