Project title
EU Constitutional Framework for Health Emergencies
Project description
This research project aims to identify empirical and legal common core of EU constitutional principles for responding to a ‘state of emergency’ caused by naturally occurring, or man-made human health disasters.
As we have seen in the current Covid19 outbreak in consecutive EU responses in e.g. passenger screening, data exchange, vaccine procurement, border management, the EU is increasingly involved in responding to man-made and naturally occurring health emergencies, but without the legal basis to do so. EU health emergency responses impact the fundamental rights and values that protect EU citizens, and it can bend or break existing constitutional limitations to respond to health emergencies.
While the power of the EU for health emergencies is growing, with it comes a constitutional void in EU law regarding legal safeguards. The central question is: What EU legal core of principles that apply in the field of human health can serve to improve the EU constitutional framework to respond to health emergencies?
Selected publications
Beetsma, R., Burgoon, B., Nicoli, F., de Ruijter, A., & Vandenbroucke, F. (2022). What kind of EU fiscal capacity? Evidence from a randomized survey experiment in five European countries in times of corona. Economic Policy. https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiac007
Kickbusch, I., & de Ruijter, A. (2021). How a European Health Union can Strengthen Global Health. Lancet Regional Health Europe, 1, [100025]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2021.100025
de Ruijter, A. (2019). EU Health Law & Policy: The Expansion of EU Power in Public Health and Health Care. (Oxford Studies in European Law). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198788096.001.0001
More about myself
Anniek de Ruijter is Director and initiator of the Law Centre for Health and Life. She is Member of the Board of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Section on Public Health and Law of the European Public Health Association. Within the University of Amsterdam she is research fellow at the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG) at the Faculty of Law of the UvA and an affiliated fellow of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES). Anniek de Ruijter is member of the editorial board of the European Journal Risk Regulation with Cambridge University Press and on the Editorial Advisory Board of The LANCET Regional Health Europe.