Suppose someone’s rights under EU law are infringed. The member state refuses to enforce the law at the highest level. The victim asks the European Commission to enforce EU law against the offending member state. The EC¹ does a superficial preliminary check and agrees that the case can move forward (past the initial screening criteria).
After deeper checks, the EC decides that they will kill the case because they are proposing future law that will remove the right anyway. Is this legal?
It seems really bizarre and chaotic that as the law changes, and a legal case often takes years, enforcement would not be based on a snapshot of the law at the time the incident occurs. And it seems extra fucked up that they would base a decision to withhold legal action on the mere speculation of future law that will be proposed, not even a law that has at least passed in Parliament. But I’m not a lawyer.
Does the idea of enforcing law that does not match the law at the time of an incident have some kind of latin name or something so I can search more about this practice?
¹ Is “EC” an abbreviation for the European Commission, or the European Council? Not sure if it’s a safe acronym to use. Laws often have EC in the citiation.
Update
I think “ex ante” is the latin term which is the opposite of “ex post facto”. Though it does not seem to be specific to the legal practice of enforcing law before it is enacted.
Let me play the devil’s advocate here :
Should people jailed years ago for smoking/selling marijuana be kept in jail after marijuana becomes legal in a country?
The same could be said about change in statute of limitation “There was a 20 years statute of limitation when I killed/raped someone 25 years ago, surely you can’t remove it now and charge me?”
I don’t know the specifics of your scenario and I tend to agree with you that the law in place at the time of the infraction should be enforced, especially if the laws that invalidate it are vague future one… But everything legal has so much ramifications that sometimes it’s hard to figure out.
That being said I am not a lawyer and not part of the EU (yet?) so don’t take anything I say seriously. It’s just two examples that came to mind when I read your post.
Should people jailed years ago for smoking/selling marijuana be kept in jail after marijuana becomes legal in a country?
To be a comparable analogy, it would have to be the flip of that. Where we decide to remove the right to smoke mj and then prosecute past users. A real world example would be in the US where the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade then started prosecutions of those who had abortions before the overturn.
Anyway, the ethics aren’t so interesting to discuss. I am just looking for info about how to counter the EU refusing to protect a liberty because (the Commission hopes) we might lose the liberty in the future anyway.
(edit) well, I should say I don’t mean to dismiss the ethical discussion. I don’t suppose it’s realistic to expect a law expert to bring insight here anyway.
In the US they revised sentences of drug offenders because you had situations like a black man doing 20 years for posession of a joint. And while they were doing absurd amounts of time, the policy got smarter (more lenient). Then at the same time prisons were ram-packed with those who had minor drug offenses and there was also a need to free up their rooms because they could not build prisons fast enough. So if they were to decide /not/ to revise sentences to match modern leniency, that would have been reckless for a number of reasons. It makes sense to prioritise the prison space for offenders who are most needed off the street.