THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION Towards a new legislative term

THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION 46 – Advance with strengthening access to information, in particular via revision of the Law on Official Secrets, taking into account European standards on access to official documents”. This is the strength of this mechanism if Member States operate on the basis of the principle of sincere cooperation and mutual trust. In Spain’s case, it is clear that this process of collective discipline has helped to noticeably improve aspects such as the need to reduce delays in the length of proceedings, rules governing con- flicts of interest and lobbyists, or official secrets legisla- tion. In all these areas, there is pressure for Spain to con- clude the reforms under way, which the pan-European dimension has placed at the centre of Spanish political and institutional discourse. The other two recommendations are more horizon- tal, in particular regarding the renewal of the Council for the Judiciary. Although EU language is extremely cau- tious, it is clear that urgent compliance with this recom- mendation must be a priority objective for the executive and the legislature, and the same is true of the changes requested regarding the statute of the Prosecutor Gen- eral. I have no doubt that there will be a qualitative intensification of political, institutional and even juris- dictional pressure, based on the need to guarantee the principle of effective remedy, if this is not done. Conclusions My main conclusions are as follows: – The EU has two well-established instruments to com- bat breaches or non-compliance with the values of article 2 TEU, which are “principles containing legally binding obligations”: the work of the Court of Justice guaranteeing the principle of effective remedy and the budget conditionality mechanism. – Moreover, the Rule of Law Mechanism, both from the institutional perspective and in terms of meta- constitutional collective control, goes well beyond a bureaucratic exercise and will increasingly be the instrument used to assess whether to undertake con- crete action against states which breach their obliga- tions under article 2 TEU. – However, we should recognise that these instruments are of limited scope and that the Gordian knot is still the inadequacy of the procedure provided in article 7 TEU to sanction serious and persistent violations of the values of article 2, or the risk of such violations. And the objective solution is simple, even if it may appear politically impossible: to convert the article 7 procedure, which is currently a mechanism of Public International Law based on sovereignty, into one that is more in accordance with common approaches in an EU based on the partial pooling of sovereignties. In sum, if respect for article 2 TEU is a constitution- al requirement when joining the EU (article 49 TEU), this constitutional requirement must be maintained throughout membership of the EU, and article 7 TEU is not fit for this purpose. There has to be a weapon of last resort, where neither the Court, nor the conditionality mechanism, nor the Rule of Law Mechanism are able to act if all the preventive, evaluation and recommendation phases fail. And this is not a maximalist demand; it is a demand to prevent the deterioration of the European political integration process, which is facing unprecedented chal- lenges, both internally and externally. Abbreviations – CJEU: Court of Justice of the European Union. – TEU: Treaty on European Union. – EU: European Union. References Baquero Cruz, Julio (2022): Minima Moralia: El Estado de Derecho, El método comunitario y el presupuesto de la Unión Europea. Revista de Derecho Comunitar- io Europeo, 72 , 431–445. https://doi.org/10.18042/ cepc/rdce.72.05 Comisión Europea (2022): Propuesta de Reglamento del Parlamento Europeo y del Consejo de 16.9.2022, por el que se establece un marco común para los servicios de medios de comunicación en el mercado interior (Ley Europea de Libertad de los Medios de