The foodborne disease and other incidents of food contamination, such as the dioxins crisis, have tested the internal market of the European Union (EU) in relation to the free movement of goods. The protective measures adopted under the safeguard clause obliged EU Member States to act in co-ordination with the European Commission and, in fact, to modify elements of their food chain structure. Certainly the agrofood safety crisis of the 1990s and the review of European food law have resulted in a system in which the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) plays a key role.

On 30 June 2009, the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court handed down its long-awaited decision on the compatibility of the Treaty of Lisbon with the German Constitution, the Basic Law. It was no surprise that the Court upheld the constitutionality of the treaty. Even the plaintiffs could not have imagined in their wildest dreams that the Court would actually say “no”. What is more than disturbing, however, is the tortuous way in which the Court's vast and verbose opinion purports to be justifying the approval of the treaty. There is probably no other judgment in the history of the Karlsruhe Court in which the argument is so much at odds with the actual result. To the point of perplexity and bewilderment, the reader of the opinion is hardly able to find any reasons supporting the outcome of the case. At the moment when the Court approves the most far-reaching revision of the European founding treaties since Maastricht, it does not present any serious argument supporting the conclusion it has reached, except sketchy evocations of a principle of “openness towards European law” it finds enshrined in the Basic Law and brief solemn reminders of a murderous past. Instead, the main thrust of the argument is a ringing indictment of European integration based on a certain idea of egalitarian and majoritarian parliamentary democracy that the Court derives from the Basic Law. Unfortunately, this standard of democratic legitimacy can only describe certain centralized states; it is unable to account for federal States, including Germany, and cannot be made to fit the federal system of the European Union.

Sixty years after the promulgation of the German constitution, which from the beginning was distinguished by its “visionary openness towards Europe,” the German Federal Constitutional Court reassessed the historic process of European integration. It reviewed the compatibility of the legal foundations of the European Union with the German Basic Law and provided a thorough overview. The Treaty of Lisbon and its sweeping, integrating reform of the European Union is compatible with the Basic Law, the Court's Second Senate ruled, so long as it is applied within the framework outlined by the Federal Constitutional Court. However, the Court found that the German implementation law is not consistent with the Basic Law. Accordingly, the Court made clear that Germany can continue with the ratification of the treaty only after introducing a new implementation law. The 147-page decision could be summarised in the following way: The European Union is an association of sovereign states and, hence, a secondary political area.

In announcing the decision of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG - Federal Constitutional Court) on the constitutionality of the Lisbon Treaty, the Presiding Justice of the Second Senate summed up the judgment by proclaiming: “Das Grundgesetz sagt ‘Ja' zum Vertrag von Lissabon.”

Generations of politicians and lawyers will have to read and re-read the recent ruling of the German Constitutional Court of 30 June 2009 regarding the Treaty of Lisbon (“Lisbon Case”) on almost a daily basis for many years to come. The Court, master of its own proceedings and not feeling bound by any doctrine of judicial self-restraint, has expounded in this decision at great length about its own philosophy of the European integration process. Based on its self-established theory, in which every German citizen is holder of a democratic right to a legislature that is endowed with substantial powers to determine the destiny of the German people, the Court examined the Treaty in each and every detail. The claimants, alleging through a constitutional complaint that this democratic right had been breached, could not point to any specific injury that they had suffered. In real terms, their constitutional complaints amounted to an ‘abstract' review of the Treaty, a remedy which the Basic Law reserves for the federal government, any government of a Land, or for a third of the members of the Bundestag. But the Court saw the constitutional complaints, which had been filed by the extreme right and the extreme left of the political spectrum, as a welcome opportunity to define the constitutional limits of the European integration process. Far from reflecting the views of the framers, the ruling reads like a political manifesto from the judges.

There is no cause for celebration: Instead, the judgement coming out of Karlsruhe must be seen as an expression of the Federal Constitutional Court Justices' fear of subjecting themselves to the European Court of Justice. Indeed, the judgment raises questions about Germany's commitment to Europe.

In its 30 June 2009 judgment on the Treaty of Lisbon, the German Federal Constitutional Court stated that “there are no decisive constitutional objections to the Act Approving the Treaty of Lisbon,” but only as long as “the provisos that are specified in the grounds” are taken into account. Thus, in conformity with the terms of the judgment, the Court has made the constitutionality of the Act Approving the Lisbon Treaty dependent on an amendment of the Act Extending and Strengthening the Rights of the Bundestag (German Federal Parliament) and the Bundesrat (German Federal Council of States) in European Union Matters. One could also put it another way: The Act Approving the Lisbon Treaty is unconstitutional as long as the constitutional concerns specified in the judgment are not met.

The aim of this casenote is to depict the essential content of the German Federal Constitutional Court's Lisbon Case. Therefore, it is of mainly descriptive nature. It primarily addresses readers wishing for a brief overview before approaching the decision itself or particularly those who might like to avoid reading the ruling in its exuberant length. In order to keep this a straightforward contribution, large parts of the judgment had to be set aside and certain necessary simplifications had to be undertaken. I acknowledge these and commend readers to the other contributions in this special collection of the German Law Journal for varied and deeper treatments of the case.

When the German Federal Constitutional Court pronounced itself on the constitutionality of the Treaty of Lisbon, its general reasoning on the character of the European Union sounded familiar. In its judgment, the Court recalls that the German Basic Law is a Europe-friendly constitution: its Preamble and its Article 23, regarding European integration, allow, and in fact prescribe, Germany's participation in the establishment of a united Europe. However, the Court also stresses the paramount position of the member states, their peoples, and their national parliaments in the institutional architecture of the EU. Already in its Maastricht Case, the Court had put an emphasis on institutional guarantees regarding the conditions under which sovereign competences may be conferred upon the EU from its constituent member states. The Lisbon Case builds upon the Maastricht doctrine, but now adds concrete instructions to the German legislature: whenever the EU institutions wish to apply certain strategic decisions under the Treaty of Lisbon, the German government may agree to them only after the two national legislative chambers, the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) and the German Federal Council of States (Bundesrat), have given their prior approval. The national statute that regulates this must (and will) be changed accordingly before Germany may ratify the Treaty of Lisbon. The strategic decisions in question mainly concern what the Court considers to be, or at least potentially to be, de facto treaty amendment procedures by which EU institutions may dynamically expand their competences or change decision-making rules without having to resort to the regular ratification procedure for new treaties. The most prominent example is the so-called passerelle (or simplified treaty revision procedure), allowing the European Council unanimously, and with the European Parliament's assent, to introduce qualified majority voting and co-decision in areas where this does not yet apply. National parliaments are informed six months in advance and each of them may cast a binding veto, but ordinary positive ratification in all member states is not required. Also for the application of the flexibility clause, allowing for EU action to attain EU goals in the absence of a specific legal basis, the German Constitutional Court requires prior bicameral approval by the national legislature. The Court rejects the idea of future treaty amendment by tacit consent, because that would undermine the prerogatives of the national legislature and, essentially, German sovereign statehood. At the risk of sounding corny, we may therefore dub the Lisbon Case “Solange III,” after the two previous Solange Cases, and summarize it as follows: As long as (or, solange, in German) the European Union is not a federal state but comprises constituent member states, the people, through the national legislature, must consciously legitimize European integration step by step. The partially enhanced flexibility of future treaty reforms envisaged under the Treaty of Lisbon is, as far as Germany is concerned, undone. But what about the other member states? Where does the Lisbon case put Germany on the European map of parliamentary democracy? How do the ratification procedures on which the German Court insists compare with the procedures of national parliamentary oversight as they exist in the rest of the Union? The present article shall put the envisaged German procedures in a comparative perspective. But first it shall reflect on some of the main features of the judgment itself.

For my grandparents Europe meant peace, for my parents prosperity, for my generation it stands for some practical advantages like traveling without border controls and stipends to study abroad.

In an era in which democracy seems to have been relegated to a secondary place by processes associated with economic and political globalization, David Schneiderman's Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy's Promise is an unusual book. Globalization, we have been told, comes accompanied by “a sense of newness, heterogeneity, and fluidity,” but Scheiderman's reminds us that all this emphasis on mobility and constant transformations “draws attention away from a transnational regime concerned with fixity and security.” This fixity not only compromises democracy's tendency towards openness and change, but restricts the state's economic functions and limits its redistributive capacity; in short, it reproduces an ideology according to which democracy is not to be trusted in economic matters. In this context, Schneiderman's proposal to “institutionalize a limited set of constitutional rules that do not impede the possibility of living up to democracy's promise, that of innovation through self-government for the purposes of collective betterment,” appears like a truly democratic call of arms.

More than a year has passed since the European Commission introduced the European Private Company (Societas Privata Europaea, SPE) in June 2008. What has become of the draft statute? This paper is meant to give a short overview of its basic features, the other European institutions' discussions and statements, the problems that prevented the proposal from being adopted so far and possible solutions that were introduced.

On 18 December 2008, the European Parliament accepted the proposals of the European Commission for amendment of the toy directive. The modifications are published in the Official Journal of the European Communities. Following publication of the new directive, the member states have 18 months in which to transpose it into national law. In Germany, in all probability, this will occur in the 2nd Ordinance to the German Geräte- und Produktsicherheitsgesetz (GPSG - Equipment and Product Safety Act). The revised laws will apply two years after the directive has come into force, while the new threshold values for heavy metals will apply in four years. Until then, the old rules will continue to apply. Thus the directive, which is over 20 years old, has been revised following increasing reports of unsafe toys, particularly, though not exclusively, from China. The aim of the amendment is to ensure that toys do not pose any health risks or risks of injury, thus achieving a reduction in the number of toy-related accidents.

Legal proceedings against Siemens AG arising from allegations of bribery were concluded on 15 December 2008 in Munich, Germany, as well as in Washington, DC. The Siemens case has been the largest of its kind. It has changed the compliance landscape and has brought criminal law out of its dark corner and to the attention of the corporate community. Board directors and other managers have painfully become aware that noncompliance with criminal law may not only threaten the existence of a company, but also may lead directly to personal criminal liability. The subject of compliance has also raised the attention of legal advisors and accountants that naturally must recommend the “best standard,” especially if the sensitive subject of corruption is concerned. Last but not least, prosecutors now have a deeper inside knowledge of corruption structures than ever before. Thus, compliance standards tend to rise expeditiously even without regulators taking any action. Siemens thereby smartly has lifted compliance to the “cornerstone” of its business and generally - in particular when it comes to anti-corruption programs -presents its improved and expanded compliance organization as a leading example.