Very special ILS Lunch Seminar with Leandro Mancano from the University of Edinburgh
The ILS Lunch Seminar of April will take in a slightly different format, as we have the honour of receiving Dr Leandro Mancano from the University of Edinburgh. He will present his most recent monograph on the European Union and the deprivation of liberty.
“The European Union and Deprivation of Liberty: A Legislative and Judicial Analysis from the Perspective of the Individual”, which will be released in May 2019, examines the EU legislative and judicial approach to deprivation of liberty from the perspective of fundamental rights and principles that are inextricably linked to the use of force over the individual. In his latest book, Mancano aims to measure Union law involving deprivation of liberty against fundamental rights which constitute the very core of the relationship between public powers and individual liberty: the principle of legality and proportionality of penalties; the right to liberty; and the reintegration function of penalties. More information can be found in the abstract provided below.
Dr Leandro Mancano is Lecturer in EU Law at Edinburgh Law School and Programme Director of the LLM in European Law. His publications focus on the interaction amongst different areas of European law and policy, such as crime, migration, and human rights. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, Leandro received his PhD from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa). He has been visiting researcher at Queen Mary University of London, Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of Copenhagen.
This ILS Lunch Seminar takes place on Thursday 11 April 2019 from 12.00 – 13.00 hrs. in KOG B0.13. Lunch is provided at the monthly seminars and there is no need to register, just join! Please contact Daila Gigengack to sign up as a speaker at an ILS lunch seminar or visit our website for more news on ILS 2.0.
“The European Union and Deprivation of Liberty: A Legislative and Judicial Analysis from the Perspective of the Individual” - Dr. Leandro Mancano
This book examines the EU legislative and judicial approach to deprivation of liberty from the perspective of fundamental rights. The setting of the story is the EU legal order, which has implications on different related levels.
Firstly, the overarching framework is the dynamic integration – fundamental rights protection: the two souls of EU constitutionalisation. The argument is that the balance between expansion of the horizon of the Union project, on the one hand, and level of individual protection, on the other, constitutes the very DNA of EU law. Deprivation of liberty suits the study of that dynamic: it expresses the exercise of sovereign powers par excellence, while requiring for that reason high standards of safeguarding.
Secondly, the objective of the research is not limited to a specific topic. To achieve the overall objective, the EU law involvement in deprivation of liberty is grouped into four main areas, each of them forming a constitutive episode of the story: substantive EU criminal law; mutual recognition and procedural EU criminal law; EU immigration and asylum law; free movement and citizenship.
In all these cases, the analysis shows that the ultimate horizon and target of the Union’s action is the creation and preservation of the EU as a borderless area – or, as alternatively referred to, the safe exercise of free movement. Such a depersonalisation of free movement goes hand in hand with the elevation of the borderless area to the role of raison d’état. Against that background, the EU law of deprivation of liberty serves to protect free movement through forced movement. Here, static rules (eg approximation of definition of offences and levels of penalties) works together with dynamic instruments (measures governing intra or extra EU transfer, such as the EAW or expulsion of irregular migrants). This system – and, more broadly, the peculiarities of the Union as a legal order – poses new challenges to traditional strongholds of personal liberty. However, the current understanding of these strongholds (the right to liberty, the principle of legality) in EU law offers an unsuitable and inadequate standard of protection. This is so because the present conceptualisation of those rights pays no heed to the characteristics of the EU as a polity.
The holistic, Union-specific approach adopted here serves not only to explain how different legal phenomena connected to deprivation of liberty have come into being in EU law. It also shows that those phenomena create a conundrum that calls for tailored solutions. The present book aims to cast new light on unprecedented legal phenomena from an unexplored perspective.