TRIIAL national reports Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, The Netherlands

Recent constitutional and legislative changes in several member states are questioning core features of EU rule of law. For the first time ever, the EU institutions have proposed activation of the preventive mechanism in Article 7 TEU against Poland and Hungary, and the European Commission has launched the rule of law conditionality mechanism against Hungary. The jurisprudence of the CJEU finding numerous violations of judicial independence and fundamental rights undermining the rule of law in Europe is growing at a fast pace. Moreover, many preliminary references show the willingness of national courts to engage in judicial dialogue with the CJEU, relying on it to provide harmonised standards and guidelines on the rule of law. However, the future of such interactions is undermined by recent decisions of supreme and constitutional courts limiting the rights of domestic courts to use the preliminary reference procedure and prohibiting their obligation to give effect to EU law based on a tendentious understanding of national constitutional identity. In this context, the TRIIAL project has embarked on an ambitious research quest, which resulted in the present Edited Working Paper. It consists of nine country reports which cover the most relevant issues concerning judicial independence, impartiality, accountability, mutual trust and the rule of law in the jurisdictions of the project partners: Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Spain and Slovenia. The country reports primarily build on case law identified and analysed during the TRIIAL project and published in the CJC database. They outline the current state of affairs and challenges the member states face in the topics covered by TRIIAL exposing and analysing specific pressing issues, especially ones that are not yet covered in other reports such as the European Commission’s Rule of Law report.