Comment by jansan
3 days ago
Even if they did, I am sure this would have been toppled by our constitutional court. You have to know that our police is not allowed to scan number plates of cars entering or leaving the country due to privacy concerns. How on earth would anyone think that lifting our dearly held fundamental right of "mail privacy" is ok?
If this was becoming an EU regulation, constitutional courts can decide to overrun constitution to uphold it (as has happened in the past plenty).
What this implies for the democratic values eu is supposed to represent is an interesting discussion.
This isn’t how EU regulation/directives work as they are not laws.
Only way this can come into force in a member country is that country making their own law implementing it. It is at that point that constitutionality should be checked and the law stopped from being implemented.
In the case it is declared unconstitutional, there are two options: take the fight to the eu/amend the law, or change the constitution. The latter is more probable than the former in the political climate of our times. So we are talking at best for some delay in implementing it.
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The claim that this can "overrun constitution" has not been true at all which we've seen in examples of other directives.
These are not simple questions, especially for people who have not studied law, but constitutional courts have decided in the past to either disregard or not such conflicts. Even if they don't, this may just result to the constitution been amended after some years by the parliament in order to comply to eu law. There is precedence of eu primacy and I do not see anything that can guarantee that a constitutional court will actually rule this way or the other here.
It would probably be toppled by courts, yes. Anyway, meanwhile they already start implementing it, developing the technology and infrastructure they can base on the next time where they basically reintroduce the same illegal laws in a new name. So companies and governments already have to spent huge sums of resources to introduce it and may fall into the sunken-cost fallacy. "If we now already have it we can also use it (for something else)"?
Even if it's EU regulation? My experience is that you get told that EU regulation and international treaties are "above our national democratic/justice system", and that we can't do anything about it.
That's how it works.
> Primacy of European Union law
> European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law
IANAL - but when EU regulation and national law regarding civil rights conflict then the citizen has the "union set" of all guaranteed rights. Or in other words: A member state can grant additional civil rights (on top of the EU charta) but can't take them away.
Germany specifically seems to have an out if it comes down to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_la...