Vassilios Skouris - Speeches and Views

Speeches and Views

In a speech in 2004, President Skouris indicated he believed that the Court of Justice served as a supreme court instead of just a constitutional court.

In a speech in 2006 at the European Conference on Subsidiarity, he described the role of the subsidiarity principle with the court, linking it to Quadragesimo Anno. He stated "what individuals can do on their own initiative and out of their own efforts, should not be taken away from them and allocated to the community, for it would be against justice for the larger entities to assume what the small entities can achieve and bring to a positive end.... Subsidiarity protects small communities against being deprived of tasks by a central power to a greater extent as necessary.” He also discussed proportionality, which he says "protects individuals against a restriction to an unnecessary extent of their rights by a measure benefiting the community."

In 2007, he visited the Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law in Dallas, along with justices from the United States Supreme Court, and attended events at the Dallas Bar Association and the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations, while delivering a speech on the role of the Court of Justice in the EU to the pro-business Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce.

At the 50th anniversary celebration for the court in 2009, President Skouris spoke about the court's earlier years of abstaining from issues of individual fundamental rights within each country but, with the new Charter of Fundamental Rights, expressed a desire, in accordance with such, to improve the rights of citizens within member nations.