On Wednesday, 18 October 2017, the China-EU School of Law hosted an open lecture. This time, Dr Andreas Orator from the Vienna University of Economics and Business spoke about “Eroding Trends of the EU Rule of Law”. Almost 40 students and scholars attended the lecture.

Dr Orator talked about the core meaning of the rule of law as an EU value and then moved to explain various instances of infringement by member states. He comparison the different types of infringements to traffic lights in order to classify their variety according to their seriousness. Consequently, he discussed the “green” ordinary infringements cases, “yellow” cases that border symptoms of “sovereignism” and “legal gymnastics”, for instance, when individual countries fight for stronger sovereignty in the face of broader European Union integration, and, finally, “red” cases that he characterised as referring to systemic deficiencies. Dr Orator spoke also about several ways of how particular infringements can be addressed on the EU level. In the course of the discussion, the audience had a chance to hear about several specific cases, including the case of the independence of judiciary and freedom of media in Hungary, the case of the neutralisation of the Constitutional Tribunal in Poland and the case of a new road toll system in Germany.