Global Europe – Basel Papers on Europe in a Global Perspective

Mitsprache oder Mitbestimmung?

Leonard Flach — 2023-10-18

This article addresses the questions of the foreign policy competencies of the Federal Assembly and how it made use of them in the negotiation of the institutional framework agreement with the EU. After a historical classification and a discussion of the relevant legal basis, the author undertakes a computer-aided content analysis of the parliamentary debates on the agreement in the Official Bulletin of the Federal Assembly. The results are then analyzed with recourse to previous insights. In doing so, he shows that there is an interplay between the expansion of parliamentary powers and diminishing opportunities for shaping them and that the Federal Assembly strives to fulfill its partial responsibility for foreign policy. In his conclusions, the author states that the increasing internationalization challenges the cooperation between the Federal Assembly and the Federal Council and that the rights to information and consultation play a key role in this debate.

EU Sanctions Policy Vis-à-Vis Russia

Arun Mahato — 2023-10-18

This research piece investigates the role of norms in European Union (EU) sanctions policy towards Russia in the context of the Russia Ukraine War. It aims to answer the research question of the extent to which the EU’s foreign policy in this particular case can be interpreted as having normative power. As an analytical lens, the Normative Power Europe (NPE) framework is used. In order to tackle the question, this study deploys an interdisciplinary approach drawing from EU law and social sciences. It combines EU legislation and case law of the European Court of Justice on the one hand, with a qualitative content analysis of official EU press releases on the other. The first part of the analysis focuses on the doctrinal legal analysis of the relevant EU law in order to account for the normative-legal basis and legitimacy of EU autonomous sanctions. The second part investigates if the EU in this particular case is guided by international norms (milieu goals) or economic interests (possession goals) and which foreign policy instruments it uses to pursue its objectives. The study finds that the EU is committed to its normative identity.

Judging Climate Change

Lyne Schuppisser — 2023-10-18

Since global and national political efforts to tackle climate change are failing, climate change litigation is on the rise worldwide. In climate change litigation, claimants try to legally advance climate protection in manifold ways. In particular, strategic, rights-based climate change litigation is becoming more common in which claimants use a human rights-based approach in their attempt to advance social change. While a rights-based claim filed by Urgenda in the Netherlands succeeded, a similar Swiss case brought by KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, failed. Why did the two cases have different outcomes despite the similarity of the cases and the countries? This paper seeks an answer by comparing the legal and political systems of the countries as well as by conducting expert interviews. In sum, the Urgenda and KlimaSeniorinnen cases differed because Dutch law has more generous procedural rules about the admissibility of claims than Swiss law. Furthermore, the Swiss highest court is more hesitant to engage in politically controversial questions compared to the Dutch highest court.