Public Lecture in Hong Kong: A Rule of Law Crisis in Europe?

EDIT (1.9.16): It seems there is quite a bit of interest in this topic, so the location of the lecture has been changed to Room 724 & 725, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong. Registration is still open!

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I will spend next week as a visitor at the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong. While there, I will be participating in a workshop and collaborating with colleagues in the CCPL, meeting with doctoral researchers and discussing their work with them, and also giving a public lecture on Friday, September 3rd.

The lecture, “Is there a Rule of Law Crisis in Europe?”, will take place at 5:30pm on the Centennial Campus of HKU (Small Moot Court, Room 723 Room 724 & 725, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower). Registration is free but encouraged, as there is a registration limit of 50. If you are in Hong Kong at the time you can register here.

This will be the third time this year that I have given lectures in which I have tried to critique a number of contemporary developments in Europe from a Rule of Law perspective. Previous lectures (in Koç University, Turkey and the University of Mauritius) focused on implications for global public law and on BREXIT respectively, but the Hong Kong lecture expands these two enquiries somewhat into a broader Rule of Law (or constitutionalism?) enquiry. The abstract provides:

Democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are said to be core values of the European public order, stretching from the west coast of Ireland to the east coast of Russia, from the Arctic Circle to the southern border of Turkey. However, in recent years these values have been placed under severe pressure in both states within Europe and the European institutions. In its reactions to security and financial crises, war, migration, and domestic political upheaval, the effective commitment of ‘Europe’ to its own self-declared fundamental values has wavered to the extent that there is now, arguably, a constitutionalist crisis in Europe. In this seminar, I trace some of these developments and argue that they reflect a deep-seated popular and institutional resistance to the idea that state power is and should be limited by transnational norms and institutions; that there is truly an international rule of law.

As the abstract may suggest, I can’t promise a particularly up-lifting lecture, but nevertheless I look forward to discussing these issues with colleagues (and former students!) in Hong Kong next week.