Constitutional Courts and rule of law in the Member States of the European Union

This paper analyzes the use of the rule of law principle in the jurisprudence of Constitutional Courts in new Member States of the Union. The purpose is to discover any recent or past decisions that could clarify the use of the principle in these countries. An example of this is the legalistic concept of the rule of law as expressed by the Hungarian and Polish Constitutional Courts at the time of verifying the constitutionality of the lustration laws. On the other hand, some Constitutional Courts have achieved a wider and more sophisticated application of the rule of law (e.g. the Czech Constitutional Court). These are issues, which may provoke a general discussion on concepts such as constitutional identity, sovereignty and the relationship between internal and European legal sources. This paper intends to widen the debate on the crisis of the rule of law in the new EU Member States underlining that some of them have jurisprudential positions that are perfectly in-line with European standards.