Titolo completo

Legal Mobilisation in EU Foreign Policy: A Framework for Going Beyond Case Studies

While civil society advocacy through legal mobilisation has garnered increasing attention, the strategic use of law in EU foreign policy remains comparatively unexplored, especially when compared to fields such as migration, the environment or labour law. Legal mobilisation here is defined in a court-centred, advocacy-oriented sense, closely aligned with the notion of strategic litigation. A methodological framework is proposed to systematically identify instances in which civil society actors invoke EU foreign policy law before the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) to advance broader objectives. Two options are suggested to analyse legal mobilisation: analysing casebooks and exploring databases of CJEU case law. Preliminary findings highlight the central role of interest groups – representing both civil society and economic actors – as drivers of legal mobilisation, the concentration of mobilisation within specific policy areas and the wide-ranging objectives pursued by litigants when leveraging EU foreign policy law.
Keywords: legal mobilisation, strategic litigation, EU foreign policy, advocacy, lobbying