This article addresses the promotion of democracy in the enlargement process of the Central and Eastern European countries. We start by outlining EU democracy promotion during accession, with a particular focus on political conditionality. In a subsequent part we argue that the European...

This paper showcases the weaknesses of EU enlargement law and demonstrates how one Member State is notable for abusing this weakness, harming the candidate countries, the EU and the institutions alike, stripping EU position of predictability and undermining EU Commission’s efforts, thus...

The Union's noncompliance with any of the standards of gay rights protection it had at its disposal in 1997, when the pre-accession Regular Reporting of the East European applicants for membership commenced, did not prevent it from promoting gay rights protection as a necessary pre-accession...

The paper explores the effectiveness of the application of the pre-accession principle of conditionality during the preparation of the fifth enlargement of the European Union, concluding that while the system of the Copenhagen-related documents devised in the course of the pre-accession could be...