Coronavirus Test of the European Union’s Policy on the Rule of Law
Abstract :
The issue of the rule of law has been on the European Union’s (EU) agenda since the
beginning of the 2010s.
The legal history of the EU shows that the EU’s approach to the topic of
the rule of law underwent significant changes. Initially, the Member States called for guarantees
of fundamental rights in EU institutions. This trend began to change in the late 1990s
and early
2000s,
when the possibility of European rule of law control over Member States and the
predecessor of the current Article 7
of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) were introduced by
the Treaty of Amsterdam. However, the idea that the EU institutions can constantly monitor the
Member States in the name of the rule of law has only emerged and started dominating
the European political agenda since the early 2010s.
Over the last decade, the EU institutions
have continuously expanded their toolkit for monitoring Member States in this regard.
Following calls from some Member States and the European Parliament, in 2014
the
Commission set up the new EU framework to strengthen the rule of law. In the same year, the
European Council introduced an annual rule of law dialogue. In 2016,
the European Parliament
proposed the establishment of an annual rule of law report that monitors all Member States. At
first, the European Commission was reluctant to accept this idea, but finally it introduced an
annual rule of law report in 2020.
However, the EU’s policy on the rule of law suffers from
fundamental shortcomings, which were especially visible during the first wave of the coronavirus
crisis in the spring of 2020.
In the pandemic situation, it has become even more apparent that the
EU’s policy on the rule of law raises a significant issue of EU institutions exceeding their
competences and stands on a questionable legal basis.
Criticisms formulated against Hungary during the pandemic have revealed that the EU
institutions
do not provide sufficient guarantees for an objective examination of the situation of
the rule of law in the Member States. The situation brought about by the coronavirus has also
raised a number of questions regarding the lawful functioning of EU institutions, which shows
the need for a rule of law mechanism capable of verifying that the EU institutions themselves
also properly respect the rule of law.