Editor’s Pick

by EVA MARIA BREDLER

There is a poem I keep on my wall, directly above my desk. It has carried me through times of transition, bold decisions, studious nights, and moments of lonely stagnation. Every time I read it, it still gives me goosebumps. Isn’t that pure magic? Rilke wrote these lines on 4th October 1899 in Berlin-Schmargendorf, and today, in 2026, they reach across time and space to touch me here in Barcelona. I’m curious what they will do to you. I’m afraid that magic might get lost in translation, so if you do speak some German, I invite you to read the original. If not, here’s a translation by Joanna Mercy:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

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The Week on Verfassungsblog

summarised by EVA MARIA BREDLER

There are many stages for the state to stage itself. Parliaments, too, dance to the music of political (dis)harmonies. We saw a particularly vivid example recently in the European Parliament, with the passing of the so-called Return Regulation – as DANA SCHMALZ already analysed last week. Her piece is now available in English, too.

The Swedish Parliament, too, is rehearsing a bold piece. A new proposal aims to strip dual citizens of their nationality when they have committed offences in connection with organised crime and gang criminality that “seriously threaten Sweden’s vital interests”. ESTER HERLIN-KARNELL (ENG) shows how the legal standard of “vital interests” is prone to misuse.

Germany has just had its own depressing premiere of a piece on the revocation of citizenship. And another piece keeps running: internal border controls – meant as exceptional, time-limited measures – have proliferated since 2015, with refugees pushed back at borders once meant to be open. Schengen is dying by a thousand cuts – and the Commission may just have helped along the way, with its long-awaited opinion on the necessity and proportionality of German border controls. LEON ZÜLLIG and STEFAN SALOMON (ENG) explain why it beats around the bush, and reveal a troubling vision for Schengen’s future.

If the Commission won’t help, perhaps German courts will. The Bavarian Higher Administrative Court and the Koblenz Administrative Court have just ruled in favour of plaintiffs challenging internal border controls – including, of all people, a law professor on his way home from the official celebration of forty years of Schengen (you can’t make that up). The federal government invoked overburdened immigration offices; the courts were unconvinced. LEON ZÜLLIG (GER) analyses the rulings (feat. Britney Spears).

While public administration claims to crumble under migration-induced burdens, new technologies arrive right on cue. In recent years, both the European Union and its Member States have come to rely heavily on advanced technologies, including AI, to support border control, migration management and asylum administration. One prominent example is the Dialect Identification Assistance System, used by the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees in asylum proceedings. JULIANE BECK (ENG) shows why that system is not a neutral, objective tool but poses risks to individual rights protection – and carries a clear danger of institutional concealment.

Advanced technologies are themselves vulnerable to threats. Geopolitical threats to data protection, in particular, can arise from armed conflicts and cyberattacks. The processing of personal data needed to deliver vital services may be disrupted, public records and databases may be destroyed, and data may be misused to enable human rights abuses. CHRISTOPHER KUNER (ENG) observes that EU law is currently unprepared, and calls for action from the EU institutions and the data protection authorities.

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While the focus today is very much on digital technologies, we should not lose sight of technologies that are tangibly changing the way we live. The EU, for instance, has just deregulated new genomic techniques in the area of genetically modified organisms –  the most radical change in EU GMO regulation in three decades. Yet ALEXANDRA MOLITORISOVÁ and ALEKSANDRA HUBAR-KOŁODZIEJCZYK (ENG) argue that the change was inevitable.

Change seemed inevitable in the United Kingdom, too: Keir Starmer resigned two years after Labour’s landslide victory – before completing a single term. GIOVANNI CAPOCCIA (ENG) argues that his fall says more about the predicaments of liberal democracy than about Labour’s failures.

The predicaments of liberal democracy have prompted PUBLIC LAW SCHOLARS (ENG) to interject in Hungary’s current play of constitutional transition. In an open letter to the Hungarian Parliament, they support replacing high-ranking public office-holders who have remained in post from the previous autocratic regime, while urging Parliament to show self-restraint when electing their successors.

New public office-holders were also elected in the small German town of Aue-Bad Schlema – though by the narrowest of margins. The CDU candidate Marcus Hoffmann edged out Stefan Hartung, the candidate of the far-right party “Freie Sachsen”, to become mayor. The election raises fundamental questions about the limits of eligibility for elected local officials. ANDREAS NITSCHKE(GER) examines how German law responds to candidates from anti-constitutional parties.

Anti-constitutional parties, in turn, respond to the law. Time and again, the AfD tries to put pressure on educational institutions by accusing them of insufficient neutrality – most recently at TU Berlin. The case fits the broader pattern of authoritarian threats to academic freedom, argues MAX LENZ (GER).

The AfD finds another stage in the civil service. For now, civil servants’ constitutional duty of loyalty still stands in the way – as it did in the recent ruling from the Berlin Administrative Court, which upheld the refusal to appoint an AfD local politician to the police force. From AfD members seeking civil service appointments, the courts demand both complete passivity and active distancing from the party’s aims – Schrödinger’s loyalty test? This case law is paradoxical, argues SOFIANE BENAMOR (ENG).

Paradoxical, too, is the way criminal law handles femicides: although the murder provision already covers them, courts have for decades failed to consistently recognise patriarchal motives as such. For ALINA GORSTEIN and SASCHA SEBASTIAN (GER), this imbalance bears on the state’s duty to protect women – and puts the legislator under obligation.

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One subject has grown over the past few weeks into a small symposium of its own: reviving the European Defence Community. After Robert Schütze’s critique, FEDERICO FABBRINI, NIELS KIRST and FRANZ C. MAYER (ENG) clarify their position.

We have continued our symposium “Inter-Judicial Dialogue on Climate Change and Human Rights” (ENG). MARIA ANTONIA TIGRE traces the arc of more than two decades of jurisprudential construction, culminating in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 on the Climate Emergency and Human Rights. LILIANA ÁVILA reads Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 as a transformative moment for organisations that have spent years fighting for communities on the front lines of the climate emergency. ANNA LUMERDING and MELANIE MAURER take the landmark KlimaSeniorinnen ruling as a starting point to examine the role of procedural rights in climate litigation before the European Court of Human Rights.

We have also launched a new symposium: “European Society After Commission v Hungary” (ENG). The landmark Commission v Hungary judgment has opened a new chapter in EU law: the CJEU not only held that Article 2 TEU can be invoked as a self-standing provision in infringement proceedings, but also acknowledged the existence of a European society in which certain values prevail – a historic first. In this symposium, we set out to show the diverse ways in which scholars from law, philosophy and the social sciences reflect on European society, in and beyond Commission v Hungary. In their introductory post, SILVIA STEININGER and JASPER SIEGERT take a genealogical approach to the emergence of European society as a research interest, and lay out its implications and challenges. ARMIN VON BOGDANDY argues that the Court is likely referring to a European society – and sketches four foundational understandings of that newly introduced (legal) concept. FRANK SCHORKOPF warns that this could turn jurisprudence into a political act, severing law from social reality. JACOB VAN DE BEETEN argues that, on closer inspection, there is little that is genuinely transformative in either the Article 2 TEU case law or its invocation of European society. The Italian Constitutional Court has just acknowledged European society for the very first time, in a case concerning citizenship for descendants of Italians abroad. For CHIARA GENTILE, the significance of that development lies in a fundamental question: who belongs to European society? PIOTR ZAŁĘSKI writes that pluralism, taken seriously, means that Article 2 TEU cannot become a mandate for one vision of the good society. OLIVER GERSTENBERG argues that it functions as a normative organising concept, guiding courts toward “reflective equilibrium” rather than top-down judicial imposition. Through a Habermasian lens, FRANCA MARIA FEISELshows that the Court’s appeal to European society as a source of authority is difficult to reconcile with democratic legitimacy.

If, in this heat, your thinking thickens – fair enough. Save Habermas for another time, and go and stare at a real stage up close instead, in the air-conditioned dark.

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That’s it for this week. Take care and all the best!

Yours,

the Verfassungsblog Team

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