Suchergebnisse

The current financial and economic crisis has highlighted the inadequacy of existing institutional and policy arrangements at the EU level. Even before this crisis, the EU economic growth was low, by international standards, revealing deep structural problems across EU countries, especially in the Southern flank. Macroeconomic imbalances have been building up, exposing a stratified EU with divergences in productivity and competitiveness, with rigidity of labour markets, impeding efficient market responses to shocks. The Monetary Union does not have adequate institutional arrangements, which may help it manage a major crisis, such as that of a last-call borrower, depreciation and burden-sharing mechanisms of asymmetric shocks, etc; various sui generis formulas are now being tested. Fiscal reactions vary depending on the level of the debts and on the speed these accumulate; at the same time, these are linked to the size of the budgetary expenditure and fiscal revenues as percentage in the GDP. The sooner the growth picks up, the more acceptable is the downsizing of the certain expenditure and/or the rise of some taxes, so that the ratio between the public debt and the GDP stabilizes (reduces, when it is the case).

The article presents the judgment delivered by the European Court of Human Rights of 5 March 2020 in GROBELNY v. Poland, by which the Court found that Article 1 of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights had been infringed following the rejection by national courts of the applicant's claim for compensation equal to the invalidity pension which he was unlawfully deprived of by applying the res judicata principle, despite the existence of relevant and sufficient grounds for departing from that principle, namely the fact that the applicant's deprivation of pension rights was the consequence of a manifest error attributable to the public authority, found as such by the court in the second dispute. The Court held that, in this way, the national authorities had failed to ensure compliance with the principles of social justice and fairness or good governance and that the burden to which the applicant was subject was disproportionate, since he was required to bear the consequences of the errors attributable to the public authorities on his own, even though he did not have any other legal means to compensate for the damage. The article also contains an analysis by the author of the ECtHR ruling.