Better late than never? On then European Commission's Rule of Law Framework and its first activation

This article first offers an overview of the European Commission's Rule of Law Framework, which was adopted in March 2014. The mechanism's potential effectiveness and the Commission's reasoning to justify its first activation against Poland in January 2016, when it has failed to do so against Hungary, are subsequently analyzed. While the Commission should be commended for seeking to address increasing rule of law backsliding at Member State level, our main submission is that reliance on the Rule of Law Framework alone, if only because of its soft and discursive nature, will not remedy a situation where systemic violations of EU values form part of a governmental plan to set up an 'illiberal' regime.

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Kochenov, D., and Pech, L. (2016) Better Late than Never? On the European Commission's Rule of Law Framework and its First Activation. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 54: 1062–1074. doi: 10.1111/jcms.1240., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12401. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

This article is part of JCMS Symposium 2016: The Great Rule of Law Debate in the EU edited by Dimitry Kochenov, Amichai Magen and Laurent Pech