On the 23rd of October 2009 the Montesquieu Institute Maastricht hosted a conference on parliamentary involvement with military missions. Even where it does not concern the actual waging of war, sending troops on military missions abroad is never undertaken lightly. No matter how many safeguards are put in place, it remains a decision that potentially risks the lives of men and women in the armed forces.

When lives are so directly influenced by political decision making, the question arises ...

Proportionality analysis describes a particular legal technique of resolving conflicts between human or constitutional rights and public interests through a process of balancing. As a general tendency, the current vivid academic debate on proportionality pays, however, insufficient attention to the institutional context – the question of judicial review. Based on the premise that proportionality analysis is a permissible approach to resolve conflicts between rights and other interests, the ...

This book provides a selection of interesting papers presented at the Third REALaw Research Forum, which was held in Utrecht on January 30, 2015. The overarching theme of the colloquium was Judicial Coherence in the European Union.

Ever since the establishment of the EU's judicial system, coherence in the administration of justice within the EU has been an intriguing topic for debate amongst legal scholars and practitioners. Throughout the development of EU (administrative) law in recent decad...