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The Supreme Courts in all the Nordic countries reserve, and exercise, the power to set aside unconstitutional laws. In this way, they protect the rule of law and the human rights that are enshrined in their national constitutions. However, they go about this in different ways and treat different constitutional rights in ways distinct from one another. In this chapter, I discuss the development of the diversified judicial review of legislation in the Nordic countries. I also discuss the independence of their judiciaries in the light of the latest developments in Europe. Finally, I discuss the importance of developing standards for the interpretation of case law on these constitutional issues. Recent development brings with it two consequences for Nordic courts: the task of assessing the independence of judiciaries in other EU states, and questions about how the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary can be strengthened at home.

The present contribution focuses on the independence of judges (in relation to the other two powers) and the freedom of expression of judges, analysing the leading case of Baka v. Hungary of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This judgment contains also a summary of the most important criteria relating to the independence of judges as they appear in the jurisprudence of this Court. More recently, these principles were applied in two other Grand Chamber cases, Denisov v. Ukraine and Ramos Nunes Carvalho e Sa v. Portugal. The cases of Baka and Denisov are related to the applicants’ removal from administrative positions, as presidents of the Supreme Court, without termination of their judicial tenure.

Only in a state based on the rule of law can there be a guarantee of democracy as well as an effective protection of human rights. The independence of the judiciary is a major pillar of any constitutional state based—within the framework of the separation of powers—on a balanced system of separation and control of powers. Effective guarantees for the preservation of democracy and the rule of law can only be achieved through a broad societal consensus on the value of rule-of-law principles. Political education is not just a task for politics and the school system, but for civil society as a whole.

The independence of judiciary is possible only in the presence of correctly developed system of checks and balances. Such a system as well as real separation of powers rely on two pillars. The first one is the so called “universal sociology”, that is to say the “rules” that are objectively universal for all, whereas the second pillar can be classified as the particular and distinctive qualities of a certain society, such as the legal and political culture and traditions. All that depends on the system of values that has its foundation in the mutual respect of the members of the society. Thus, it is a sequence of ethics-sociology-politics-law. Only based on such methodological approach can be formed a real independent judiciary.

This chapter establishes the central argument of this book: British colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India resulted from Indians’ forum shopping and the consequent jurisdictional jockeying between the executive (the East India Company) and the judiciary (the King’s Court). Developing on recent studies of politics and law in British colonies, this chapter introduces two types of discourse on colonial governance: the King’s Court’s logic of law asserting that the colonial government should be constrained by the independent judiciary as practised in Britain, and the EIC’s logic of emergency insisting that the executive should retain the power of extra-legal intervention in judicial affairs because India was in an incessant state of emergency.

Scholars have been studying in what ways the design of international organizations (IOs) matters and under which conditions IOs can tie the hands of domestic politicians. All IOs are not alike; they differ in their degree of institutionalization. Given these differences in IO design, this paper contributes to explaining which type of democracy is more likely to choose being part of which type of IO. We find robust evidence that democracies with majoritarian electoral institutions are more likely to become members of IOs that are more highly institutionalized. At the same time, these same democracies are not more likely to become members of IOs that possess only a minimal degree of institutionalization. We posit that this is not a mere coincidence, but can be explained with political economy reasoning that pays close attention to institutional differences. Politicians in democracies with majoritarian electoral institutions are subject to strong pressures to give in to parochial demands. When deciding about which type of IOs to join, these politicians are likely to value those IOs that help them show to their constituents that their hands are tied. Our analysis, which covers 96 democracies from 1970 to 2005, indicates that besides electoral institutions, other institutional features of the domestic political system also exert a consistently significant effect on IO membership choices, namely presidentialism, age of democracy, and legal origin. We contribute to the political economy literature by explaining decisions to join IOs and also, more importantly, our empirical results highlight how IO design matters for these decisions.

Judicial independence is a cornerstone of the rule of law. This notion is gaining relevance as a result of the judiciary reforms implemented in many non-liberal democracies. Both the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have often addressed judicial independence. However, only recently have they tied judicial independence with the rule of law. The CJEU has moved from a specific vision tied to the EU notion of national court or tribunal to a constitutional dimension whereby, through a creative interpretation of the second subparagraph of Article 19(1) TEU, considers that the principle of judicial independence is inherent to this provision. As for the ECtHR, some individual complaints arising from measures adopted by states signatories of the ECHR where there are systemic deficiencies in the rule of law related to judicial independence have resulted in interesting decisions. Nevertheless, the ECtHR’s individual right-oriented approach, and the fact that judicial review is implemented by means of individual complaints, narrow the ECtHR’s scope of action to tackle potential systemic risks entailed by the violations of judicial independence. In any case, the protection of judicial independence as an inherent element of the rule of law should not be dealt with in comparative terms, but rather in terms of cooperation. To this date, the contributions of both courts have proven the importance of the judicial dimension to counter the threats to the independence of the judiciary.