Transnational Justice and the EU Security Regulation Project

The combination of sovereignty, justice and international law, the very title of this panel, may actually seem controversial. What kind of justice are we discussing while still respecting “sovereignty”? There is a well-known dichotomy between values of sovereignty on the one hand and universal human rights and global justice concerns on the other hand (Tan 2017). Still the striving for justice in any society or organization is often considered as a self-evident political objective. Surely, no civic-minded person would argue against justice as a normative benchmark for a decent society. However, is concept of justice at risk of losing any concrete meaning? International law requires states to act as the guardians of rights (Criddle and Fox-Decent 2016). According to this model, the state is accountable under international law for safeguarding equality and freedom. The EU offers a good test case. While sovereignty is considerably weaker in an EU law context as compared to international law, Member States have a number of core national competences such as national security and national identity. Moreover, e.g., EU citizenship is secondary and contingent on an individual holding a national citizenship. A key debate in EU political theory at present is the question of justification and recently also the meaning of justice (Neyer 2012, Forst 2017). As Benhabib (2016) points out, the question of normative justification is also about democratic legitimacy, since the transnational law project cannot sacrifice deliberation. It seem as if the question of justification has largely become one of a substitute debate for democracy beyond the state (Kjaer 2017). Within the wide grid of security regulation, the idea of justice and public justification seems highly relevant. In order to address these questions in greater depth, the paper will examine the significance of justice theory in the specific framework of EU security regulation.