This follows from a turbulent time at Roskilde University, with political attacks from the central government for their (previously) high admission of foreign students and widespread student protests against genocide.

Part of the case against Michelle Pace is her alleged illoyalty against her employer for failing to name students participating in protests to the University leadership. She claims she could not recognize them from blurry pictures, but admits she wouldn't have named them anyway.

The picture it paints of Roskilde University can best be described as disturbing. Most of the academic staff Danish newspaper Politiken talked to wished to remain anonymous, and communicated over Signal as they are afraid of being wiretapped. They were initially afraid of speaking to journalists on the phone, and work e-mail was out of the question. They feared they would be fired for illoyalty.

Academic freedom is, in other words, already dead.

Shocking news out of Roskilde University: Last December, Professor Michelle Pace was fired from the university for being outspoken against genocide.

A favourite professor among students, her main offence is allegedly to have invited said students to a breakfast meeting.

Other offences include participating in reading poems without prior permission and speaking out against Danish xenophobia and academic freedom in international media.

https://politiken.dk/danmark/art10961802/Professor-forsvandt-med-dags-varsel-RUCs-anklager-mod-mig-er-falske-og-fabrikerede #Palestine #Gaza #academia

RE: https://curia.social-network.europa.eu/@Curia/116730408835298643

Good news for the Europeans out there still working to defend international law and human rights: The #CJEU just ruled that being on an American sanctions list is not sufficient reason for banks to refuse people from opening accounts.

People on said sanctions list includes high-ranking officers of the International Criminal Court.

I had the opportunity to already make use of parts of these data for my own dissertation, published in the Journal of Common Market Studies last year on the use of deference by the CJEU.

https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13547

There is, without a doubt, a lot more to gain!

The result of this (incredibly) hard work is now available for all to use, with variables ranging from deference to national courts to legal outcomes.

The full data is available from the IUROPA project:
https://iuropa.pol.gu.se/doctrine-and-legal-outcomes

Lucía López Zurita and Eun Hye Kim, both PhDs from the #EUI, sank an incredible amount of hours into this project; the same goes for a number of research assistants associated with the project.

The result is incredibly rich data informed entirely by legal expertise.

As a political scientist dabbling with #EU #law, it is often painfully clear that lawyers are needed to help make sense of certain legal concepts.

Thankfully my #EUI co-authors just finished hand-coding more than 3000 #CJEU judgments, all #openaccess!

You can read all about it in the Journal of Law & Empirical Analysis:
https://doi.org/10.1177/2755323X251337809

Although Poland's policy of non-appointment to the CJEU has gone under the radar of most observers, it might very well constitute the first real instance of backlash against the European court.

I explore this further in this blog post:
https://brekke.it/?page=content&id=2024-11-18-Polish_non-appointments

@DetersHenning I finally managed to get a confirmation about what's going on with the Polish judges at the CJEU, related to what we were talking about over here:
https://eupolicy.social/@DetersHenning/110854287525514497

In the same period, Hungary has continued making successful appointments to the court, most lately Zoltán Csehi to the Court of Justice in 2021 and Krisztián Kecsmár and Tihamér Tóth to the General Court in 2022.

It therefore seems there is no inherent impossibility for authoritarian governments to make successful judicial appointments to the #CJEU, even after the introduction of the 255 panel in 2010.

8/8

Poland's strategy before the #CJEU might appear self-defeating, as the refusal of a single member state to appoint judges to the European court seems to have constituted no significant threat to the European judicial order. Rather, it has passed by largely unnoticed.

On the other hand, one might speculate that it has benefited #Poland, giving Polish judges long and seemingly successful tenures at the CJEU despite the turbulent political situation at home.

7/8

But why does the Polish refusal to appoint judges to the #CJEU continue even today, even after the PiS lost power in the 2023 election?

Polish appointments to the European court must not only be made by the government, but approved by the president. The presidency, of course, is still held by PiS.

Presidential elections in Poland are held again next year.

6/8

So why is Poland not sending judges to the European court? There is an element of self-censorship at play.

The suitability of judge nominees to the #CJEU are assessed by the so-called 255 panel, ensuring a working knowledge of the French language and EU law.

Poland has not had its nominations blocked by this panel; the PiS government was merely uninterested in nominating any candidate who could stand a chance of being considered fit. Instead they refused to make any nominations at all.

5/8

The situation is similar in the first instance General Court, where the final two Polish appointments were made in March 2016.

Krystyna Kowalik-Bańczyk was appointed with a term set to end in 2022; Nina Półtorak was only appointed for a five-month term, scheduled to end in August 2016.

With no successor appointed, both are still active at the General Court.

Kowalik-Bańczyk was made President of the Seventh Chamber in September 2022, the month after the expiration of her original mandate.

4/8

When Safjan, born 1949, retired in January this year, there were still nobody to replace him; his seat at the court was therefore left empty. As a consequence, Poland is not currently represented with a judge at the highest court of the #EU.

Who remains is the Polish Advocate General, Maciej Szpunar, who was appointed as late as in 2018 and whose term was only supposed to end this October.

Szpunar has now made First Advocate General, and like Sefjan he has had no nominated successor.

3/8

The last appointed Polish judge to the #ECJ, Marek Safjan, started his career at the court in 2009. He was reappointed in 2015 for six-year mandate that ended in October 2021.

However, Safjan ended up serving at the Court until January this year, even without a renewed mandate since 2015.

The reason is simple: While #CJEU judges are appointed for limited terms, their mandate only expires when they are replaced by their national successor. Never being replaced, Safjan's term never expired.

2/8

The European Court of Justice consists of 26 judges; one from each #EU member state.

...wait, what?

Poland has, for years, refused to appoint judges to the #CJEU, leaving the 27th seat of the Court empty.

🧵: 1/8

#ECJ #Poland #EUlaw #Europe #RuleofLaw

The #Tisza Party has taken Hungarian politics by storm this year. This is the first time I'm seeing it outperform #Fidesz in the polls in #Hungary. 🇭🇺

It's still a long way to go before the election, but today is a good day for a reminder that democratic backsliding can, in fact, be reversed.

https://mastodon.social/@eunews/113440612954342667

#EU #Europe #elections #democracy

We might, for example, ask how the #UK Supreme Court is performing in terms of gender #equality at the bench. The results are not uplifting: After a slight improvement in the late 2010s, around half the judgments (48%) published since 2020 are signed by panels of exclusively male justices.

Despite a terrible historical track record for gender balance at the #UKSC, there seems to be no sign of improvement over time, with last year having the worst #gender balance in recorded history.
#courts

I scrape data from the official website of the #UKSC illustrating various techniques for data gathering and management using #rstats. The data is also published on my website, providing information about Supreme Court judgments from 2009 until today.
https://brekke.it/?page=data&set=uksc