Volume 11, Issue 4 -

Europe can be considered a sort of fortress of the protection of socio-economic rights. However, this bright scenario has been unsettled by the eruption of the Eurozone crisis, which has challenged the narrative of social Europe and swept away protections for social rights in Member States grappling with sovereign debt crises such as Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus, Latvia and Romania. In these countries, austerity measures led to persistent violations of social rights, under the external constraint of conditionality regimes which involved cuts in wages, pensions and welfare services. Consequently, austerity measures were challenged in domestic and European Courts and before the ECSR. In other words, there has been a ‘turn to the law’, in order to give concrete effect to the potential offered by the relevant legal instruments. What has been the general attitude of the Courts and quasi-judicial bodies to actions challenging austerity measures? Since the analysis of how the Courts and other human rights bodies manage the complex and controversial balance between austerity and social rights is an excellent ‘stress test’ to determine the ‘weight’ of the latter not only in the political debate, but also in the human rights discourse, this paper will focus on the ‘crisis cases’ in Europe, so as to shed light on the actual level of protection for social rights.

In September 2014, the deadlock over election reforms in Hong Kong sparked off a mass civil disobedience occupy movement. This political dispute eventually reached the legal arena after the filing of injunction applications before the courts of Hong Kong to clear the protest sites. This article aims to discuss the courts’ approach towards the adjudication of these injunction cases. In particular, this article will review: (a) the appropriateness of the scope of the interim injunctions granted to protect the plaintiff’s personal rights under the tort of public nuisance; (b) the function of the police in implementing the injunction orders; (c) the position the courts should adopt in defending individual rights of the plaintiffs if a similar remedy is already available under the statute; and (d) the way courts should reconcile competing claims and protect both the unidentified protestors’ human rights and the private rights of the plaintiffs. The article maintains that the injunction cases have set rather dangerous precedents regarding the protection of fundamental rights in Hong Kong in cases of public order involving protection of private rights. The same analysis leads to the conclusion that in a democratic society, the courts have a duty to find the balance between the protection of fundamental human rights and private rights under tort of nuisance, while also observing significant procedural rules.

This article investigates the extent to which the Romanian Constitution has provided for adequate means to enhance women’s equal citizenship in its first twenty-five years of existence. Taking as its starting point Simone de Beauvoir’s thought, encompassed in the idea that gender inequality is derived from defining women as ‘the Others’ or as totally opposite to men, the article shows that since its adoption in 1991, the Romanian Constitution began to depart from the stereotypical and antagonistic understanding of women and men’s roles in society that Romania had inherited from its Socialist past. In 2003, when the Constitution was reviewed for Romania’s EU and NATO accession, the requirement that only men should serve in the military was replaced with the guarantee of equal opportunities for men and women to occupy public, civil or military positions. Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court inched toward being an active actor in advancing gender equality. For example, in 2005 the Court held that allowing only women in the military, but not men in the same position, to take parental leave was unconstitutional and, in that same year, it gave women’s reproductive rights a rather liberal interpretation. However, this article argues that the developments that have taken place have not been progressive enough. The Constitution still provides only for paid maternity leave, provides special working conditions only for women, does not explicitly mention the protection of reproductive autonomy, does not connect bodily rights with equality but with privacy, and lacks clarity on the admissibility of measures – such as gender quotas – to promote more women into the public sphere.

The current Romanian constitutional system, established in 1991, has undergone numerous formal and informal developments in the last 25 years. The main issues that arose in the decade since the country’s adhesion to the European Union were the respect for the rule of law, independence of the judiciary and the fight against corruption. In this context, the Constitutional Court has been one of the central elements of the rule of law guarantee in Romania. This paper intends to present a critical overview of the actual role of the Constitutional Court in the Romanian constitutional system, in the different contexts that link the Court with ‘others’, ie mainly with State powers (the Court itself being and independent organ, placed outside the judicial power).

The construction of names and the use of nobility titles is not regulated by European Union law. Yet the Court of Justice of the EU has had to deal with such issues on various occasions where national rules on names or titles had to be contrasted with the EU law on equal treatment, Union citizenship and free movement and residence. Rules on names fall essentially within the competence of the member states, but the states have to regard EU law when exercising this competence. Our paper undertakes to analyse this issue in light of a recent relevant judgment, the Bogendorff von Wolffersdorff case, having regard also to the Court’s reasoning regarding the national constitutional identity clause [Art 4 (2)TEU]. We argue – inter alia – that the Court of Justice decided in this judgment not to favour the rights of a free-moving EU citizen (even if the judgment admittedly affects only a limited circle of individuals) and put national constitutional identity first, yet the way in which the identity clause was used by the Court is also debatable in our view.