This article offers a comprehensive examination of the rationale underlying the rule of law framework adopted by the Commission in March 2014 before outlining its main features. It is argued that while the Commission's ‘light-touch' framework falls short of what is required to effectively...

The paper analyses the current state of the right to leave any country in International Law. Having provided a brief outline of the key instruments of International Law both at the general and at the regional levels responsible for the formal shaping of the right (I.) the analysis moves on to a...

Aiming at outlining the essential framework of EU citizenship’s specificity in the context of the Overseas Countries and Territories associated with the Union (OCTs), this paper approaches the development of the legal status of EU citizenship as a process of the redefinition of the territorial...

To redeem the Union in Europe, which is hijacked by the substitution of the grand promise of peace and better life for all – the idea of European unity – with the internal market ideology, which meant to serve as a means of integration, rather than an end in itself, this paper suggests to...

This contribution embraces a purely utilitarian view of European Union law in suggesting a viable way to enlarge the horizon of opportunities of the holders of the so called “non-citizen” status in the Republic of Latvia, which is reserved for some ethnic minorities in that country and does...

Many believe that duties should be at the essence of citizenship. This paper dismisses this view, using EU law as the main context of analysis, by making five interrelated claims. (1) There are no empirically observable duties of EU citizenship; (2) such duties would lack any legal‐theoretical...

The paper makes an attempt to map the Copenhagen criterion of democracy and the rule of law, one of the main instruments governing the biggest enlargement in the Union history. The meaning of it, however, is still as vague today as it was more than ten years ago, at the time of introduction of...

This note provides a detailed account of the development of the EU enlargement law. Based on the material provided by the latest enlargement round, it outlines the main set of enlargement principles, criteria and procedural tools employed by the Union in the process, also making a sketch of the...