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Germany’s top judges are sorry — that Europe just doesn’t seem to get it.
In an extraordinary media blitz, the top two judges on Germany’s Constitutional Court (known by its German abbreviation, BVerfG) defended their controversial decision last week to effectively overrule the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the question of the European Central Bank’s bond buying program. A 2018 ruling by the European court permitting the practice was so obviously beyond the pale that the German intervention was “mandatory,” Justice Peter M. Huber, the lead author of the ruling, told a German newspaper.
"As long as we don't live in a European state, a country’s membership will be governed according to its own constitutional law," Huber told German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Wednesday, rejecting assertions that the CJEU, the EU’s highest court, had precedence over national courts.
Huber said that while the court knew the ruling would make waves, he was surprised by the “one-sidedness” and “zealous tone” of the response. Constitutional law experts from around Europe, including Germany, took issue with the opinion. The fact that both Huber and Andreas Voßkuhle, the court’s former chief justice who also shaped the opinion, took the rare step of granting a string of interviews with German media to explain their reasoning, suggests that the BVerfG was unsettled by the European reaction....