Gunnar Beck

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Gunnar Beck is a German politician, academic and lawyer.

In his 2013 study entitled The Legal Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the EU[5] Beck argues that The ECJ was established at the same time as the EU (then the European Economic Community) to settle disputes between the EU’s institutions and its member states and to provide authoritative guidance on the interpretation of the EU Treaties and EU legislation. He claims that it has never discharged that function impartially. He says, the Court has drawn inspiration from its integrationist vision of ‘"ever closer union" between the EU’s members, the Court has used the purposive approach consistently to resolve legal disputes concerning the distribution of powers between the EU and members in a pro-integrationist manner. He concluded the Court has repeatedly the scope of EU law without reference to the Treaties. and established its own judicial oversight over many areas of national law. It has usually done so in the absence of Treaty authority and not infrequently in a departure from clear language in the Treaties or EU legislation. As a result, the scope of EU law is incrementally expanding from one judicial decision to the next.^[6]

Political career

Beck was a Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2024^[7], where he represented the German party Alternative für Deutschland. In March 2022 he was elected Vice President of the Parliament's Identity and Democracy (ID) Group .^[8]. From 2020 to 2022 he led the ID delegation to the Conference on the Future of Europe. Beck repeatedly criticized the pseudo-democratic processes of the Conference which lacked democratic legitimacy. He revealed that the 800 citizens who ostensibly drew up the Conference's final recommendations had been handpicked by EU officials and pro-EU non-governmental organizations and that throughout the process and before each of the over a dozen Conference plenary sessions in Strasbourg, the citizens had been closely advised and briefed by EU and NGO Spinelli experts. Beck concluded that the Conference recommendations bore a striking resemblance to previous European Commission white papers and blueprints for EU treaty reform. They had not been written by the Conference, but drawn up behind closed doors and pulled out of locked drawers just in time before the final presentation in May 2022. Beck called the Conference's citizens' participation nothing but a charade.

During his parliamentary term Beck was also a member of other EU Parliamentary committees: Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs ECON; Committee on Legal Affairs; and the Committee on Constitutional Affairs as well as Delegation to the EU-Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee; from 2021 he also served on the Subcommittee on Tax Matters.^[8]

As early as April 2021 he called for Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, to resign over the "disastrous" EU Covid vaccination and lockdown policy. He said "von der Leyen was a disastrous minister in Germany, and has proved the same now as Commission President."^[9] In 2023 he congratulated her on achieving almost all her policy objections, but added that "her remarkable successes would ultimately proved more expensive and disastrous to the peoples of Europe than all the failures of her predecessors taken together."

Academic title dispute

Prior to the European Parliament election, it was reported that Beck was listed on the ballot paper as holding a professorship, even though he holds the less senior rank of reader at SOAS. The German Bundeswahlleiter, however, has confirmed that Beck was not responsible for the information on the ballot paper, as he simply entered his first name and his surname without any titles.^{[citation needed]} Accordingly, Beck explained that he had merely translated his British university title and defended his actions as "legally unobjectionable and correct in content."^[10] Yet, according to the Ministry of Science and Culture of North Rhine-Westphalia, which is governed by the ruling CDU in coalition with the FDP Liberal Party, the "simple conversion of a British university position into a German title" may not be lawful in Germany even if it is a correct translation of the equivalent professional position of a person.^[11][12]

Works

• Beck, Gunnar (2013). The Legal Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the EU. Oxford: Hart Publishing.
• Beck, Gunnar (2008). Fichte and Kant on Freedom, Rights and Law. Lexington Books.

References