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1.2 million euro research award for Kent law lecturer

Dr Anneli Albi, Senior Lecturer at Kent Law School (KLS), University of Kent, has been awarded 1.2 million euros by the European Research Council for a five-year research project titled ‘The Role and Future of National Constitutions in European and Global Governance’.

The funding is from the Council’s Independent Starting Grant programme, a highly competitive scheme designed to support frontier research by leading young international scholars.

The project aims to revisit the role of national constitutions at a time when decision-making has increasingly shifted to the transnational level. According to Dr Albi, ‘national constitutions have often come to be seen as somewhat old-fashioned bulwarks of sovereignty. However, the project will explore other constitutional values that seem to have a continued importance in the contemporary globalising world, for example the protection of constitutional rights, the rule of law, legitimacy and democratic checks and balances. Concerns have increasingly been voiced with regard to a certain degree of erosion of classic constitutional safeguards in European and global governance’.

The key examples that the study hopes to explore include defence rights in the European Arrest Warrant system and access to justice in the global fight against terrorism. Additionally, 34,000 individuals in Germany and civil rights groups elsewhere have brought constitutional cases against a European directive that requires the storing of data on everyone’s electronic correspondence. More recently, issues around democracy and legitimacy have been raised in relation to policy responses to the global financial crisis.

The project also seeks to analyse the role of constitutional courts in drawing attention to these issues in transnational judicial dialogues. Another line of inquiry will be to find out how the texts of the constitutions reflect the shift of decision-making powers from domestic to European and global institutions.

Professor Rosemary Hunter, Acting Head of KLS, said: ‘This grant testifies to the strength and international esteem of the research on European and global governance carried out at Kent, particularly in the Law School’s Centres for European and Comparative Law and Critical International Law. It builds on and further advances Kent’s reputation for critical legal and interdisciplinary research of the highest quality.’

Professor John Baldock, the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, added: ‘This substantial funding for important research is further recognition of the skills of Dr Albi and the esteem of Kent Law School.’

Dr Albi joined Kent Law School in 2003, having been a doctoral researcher at the European University Institute in Florence (1999-2003). She obtained her undergraduate law degree and a diploma in political science from the University of Tartu, Estonia.

Contact: pressoffice@kent.ac.uk

Story published at 3:50pm 18 January 2012