Establishing the Rule of Law in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice: the Impact of the Treaty of Lisbon and the Stockholm Programme

The Treaty of Lisbon reforms the area of freedom, security and justice fundamentally. The dynamics within the police and judicial cooperation will increase and the Stockholm program - the new political program of the area of freedom, security and justice - will intensify these developments. The integration of police and judicial cooperation into the concept of community law leads to a new dimension of legal protection, parliamentary involvement and importance of human rights. This presentation however will challenge the view that all problems in this context have been solved with the introduction of the Treaty of Lisbon. On the contrary, the struggle for the rule of law in this area has just begun.

Konrad Lachmayer is a senior lecturer and a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Vienna. He was a visitor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Cambridge (Wolfson College) in 2007 and Humboldt scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg in 2008. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Vienna Online Journal on International Constitutional Law (www.icl-journal.com).