Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta joined the Jacques Delors Centre and the Centre of Fundamental Rights to make the case for the EU as a federal liberal democracy built on shared constitutional values.
On 27 February 2026, the Jacques Delors Centre and the Centre of Fundamental Rights welcomed Tamara Ćapeta, Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union, for a keynote and discussion on the EU as a constitutional democracy. The event at the Hertie School was moderated by Prof Mark Dawson, Co-Director of the Jacques Delors Centre, while Prof Violeta Moreno-Lax, Director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights, and Senior Researcher Ana Bobić joined the discussion.
Ćapeta opened her keynote by painting a broad picture of EU constitutional law, beginning by an abstract vision and later moving to the practical realities by adopting a case-by-case approach. She described the European Union as a federal liberal democratic order grounded in shared constitutional values, but emphasised that liberal democracy must ultimately originate within the member states themselves. In her view, democratic commitments cannot simply be imposed by the Union from above.
Ćapeta then turned to the more practical role of the Court in current controversies. Taking the pending case of Commission v. Hungary as her example, she examined whether values can and should function as an independent legal requirement for the Court. She proposed the concept of "negation of values" as the threshold for a finding of breach, arguing that not every disagreement over values should lead to a finding of breach. The threshold, in her view, should be reserved for cases where a member state actively rejects a fundamental element of liberal democracy. She described these as “red lines” that should only rarely need to be invoked.
The discussion that followed raised questions about the limits and implications of this framework. Prof. Moreno-Lax pressed Ćapeta on what distinguishes a single human rights violation from a broader systematic negation of values at the state level. She warned of a two-track human rights system emerging within EU law and raised concerns about the consolidation of a regime that protects EU citizens more robustly than non-citizens, drawing on the Court's recent judgment in the Danish "ghetto laws" case on racial discrimination in housing. Moreno-Lax also questioned whether the EU's own migration and asylum policies could be considered compatible with the values enshrined in Article 2 of the EU Treaty.
In her intervention, Ana Bobić praised Ćapeta's opinions for building robust accountability of both member states and EU institutions around fundamental rights. However, she raised the deeper question of whether a court is the appropriate institution to define the content of a "good society": “The EU is sorely missing a public sphere that is not always the Court,” Bobić emphasised, suggesting that debates about the values of European societies cannot be resolved by judicial decisions alone.
Overall, the afternoon presented an insightful debate on some of the most consequential questions facing European law and democracy today.
You can revisit the full event via YouTube, as linked below.
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Photos: Vincent Mosch
