Forward or Back: The Future of European Integration and the Impossibility of the Status Quo

This article considers how the legal and political order of the EU can cope if the ‘Ever Closer Union’ envisaged by the Treaties ceases to be inevitable. In particular, it focuses on what are the likely consequences if previously successful integration mechanisms such as integration through law (including adventurous pro‐integration interpretation by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)) and functional integration can no longer successfully push forward the integration process. It considers whether it is possible for the Union to ‘stand still’, that is, to maintain the current level of integration without either moving forward to more intensive integration or engaging in costly and disruptive disintegration. In order to substantiate this claim, the article looks at three areas, the law of citizenship, the Eurozone and the legislative structures of the Union, showing in each case that the neither the current degree of integration nor methods used in recent times to move the integration process forward provide a long term basis for policy.     

Religion in the Workplace: Eweida and Others v United Kingdom

The European Court of Human Rights judgment in Eweida and Others v United Kingdom dealt with the increasingly controversial questions of religious symbols at work and the clash between free conscience and anti‐discrimination norms. In a change of approach, it held that the right to resign could no longer be seen as adequate protection for religious freedom and that workplace norms that restrict religious liberty must satisfy a proportionality test. However, it accorded a wide margin of appreciation to States in reconciling freedom of conscience and freedom from discrimination, ruling that the importance of non‐discrimination could justify a failure to exempt a religious individual from complying with a policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.