How Germany’s law-breaking undermined the EU

Well over a year ago I wrote about how Germany had broken both the EU treaty and so international law, when its constitutional court ruled against the ECB’s bond-buying programme during the pandemic. Germany remains in breach of that law and has not been punished by the EU. The breach is, I think, simple to understand: 27 members sign up to a club and agree to be bound by its rules. If one member says ‘no actually I control the rules’, that’s Germany and it has broken them.

The EU tried to paper over the cracks caused by Germany’s EU law breaking, but nothing has yet sealed the hole Germany made. You can think of laws much like walls. We lawyers police these boundaries on how you can or cannot behave. Because we have police to help us and because most normal people only really think about law as ‘criminal law’ we tend to forget this.