Person: Kouroutakis, Antonios
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Antonios
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Kouroutakis
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IE University
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IE Law School
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Public Law and Global Governance
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Publication Inaction as a State Response to the Coronavirus Outbreak: Unconstitutionality by Omission(Seattle University School of Law, 2022-07-19) Kouroutakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75The World Health Organization on March 11 declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. While the pandemic was spreading across the globe, governments were under pressure to respond. Still, some countries during the first wave of the pandemic, in their first reaction, did not put in place any emergency regulations. Such reaction, which was a policy option, was an intended omission as lawmakers and policy makers decided not to take action and such emergency omission was a novelty and a paradox in emergency situations. Moreover, I argue that during emergencies governments have a distinct duty to act, and I offer justifications. In this article, I seek to answer that question and to inspire reflection on what constitutional mechanisms we have to compel the executive to take action in an emergency. I will argue that the legal mechanism to provide remedies because of emergency inaction are subject to some inherent limitations, while such issues are left to be resolved via the political process with ordinary politics. I will argue that there are three approaches to compel action and avoid emergency omission. I base the first approach on constitutional design. While in most of the countries the emergency power is concentrated in the hands of the executive, what I call the monopoly of emergency powers, in countries with multilevel governments such as in federal and devolved states, the two-tier executive, at national and local level, allows constitution designers to allocate to both executives emergency powers. The second approach puts courts at the heart of the solution with judicial review. However, courts are less likely to find state authorities liable for non-feasance. On the top of that, the deference that judges show in times of emergency would deter the chances for judges to compel emergency action. Finally, this article will conclude with a third approach. This approach stresses that the evaluation of the emergency omission is left to be resolved via the political process with ordinary politics.Publication The Henry VIII powers in the Brexit process: justification subject to political and legal safeguards(Taylor & Francis, 2020-09-03) Kouroutakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75Henry VIII powers, which are commonly found in legislation, until recently, were not an issue of major constitutional concern. However, their extensive use in the EUWA and the subsequent EUWAA attracted the attention of academics and politicians alike. This article aims to offer justifications for the use of Henry VIII powers in extraordinary situations such as Brexit, given that such powers would be subject to enhanced legal safeguards. In doing so, this article examines the challenge that the Brexit process poses to the law making institutions, and it elaborates on how the proper use of Henry VIII powers has the capacity to meet the Brexit ends. It also focuses on the particular Henry VIII powers in the EUWA and the EUWAA and it examines both the legal and the political safeguards. It evaluates both the legal and the political safeguards and it highlights their positive and negative aspects. Finally, this article concludes with a set of legal safeguards, procedural and material, that are necessary for the proper use of such powers in future legislation. In particular, it argues that the proper use of Henry VIII powers should include at least two safeguards; first a pre-legislative stage attracting public engagement and second a substantive limit according to which the executive should not be allowed to use Henry VIII powers to amend acts of constitutional value and most importantly the enabling act. Accordingly, it proposes that there is need for a constitutional statute to set uniform safeguards and standards for every use of Henry VIII powers.Publication EU Action Plan Against Disinformation: Public Authorities, Platforms and the People(SSRN, 2020-10-30) Kouroutakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75In democracies, people (demos in Greek) hold the power (kratos in Greek). When people elect their representatives from a number of candidates, such power is temporarily transferred to their elected representatives. Thus, the quintessence of democracy is a system of trust and accountability. Such power is returned to the people every time elections are held and people periodically evaluate their representatives and hold them accountable for their actions and omissions. If people are not satisfied with their representatives, they can always replace them with their competitors. For democracy to function in a proper manner, it is important that people are able to actively participate and vote based on trustworthy, accurate and complete information. But this system of trust is distorted by disinformation which became a fast-paced and widespread phenomenon. A foriori, during electoral periods, disinformation might have a decisive impact on the electoral result. A number of incidents of orchestrated disinformation around the world, alarmed the policy makers in the EU ahead of the European Parliament elections in May 2019 and the EU Action Plan Against Disinformation was adopted. This Action Plan is the most concrete and specific initiative on the matter. It is a modest regulatory intervention, based on soft law and self-regulation. As it is subject to a 12 month sunset clause, this marked its experimental nature and the EU Commission’s effort to monitor closely its application. The success of the action plan was based on the cooperation of the public authorities, of the platforms and the people. In substance, it was focused on four core areas: first on the improved detection of disinformation, second on the coordinated responses of disinformation, third on the cooperation with online platforms and the industry, and finally on the raising awareness and building resilience amongst citizens.Publication Public Data, AI Applications and the Transformation of the State: Contemporary Challenges to Democracy(Springer Nature, 2024-12-12) Kouroutakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75The use of AI applications and their abilities might have an unparallel transformative force on the state and the administration’s relationship with its citizens. Their application has the potential to usher in a new paradigm where alternative ways to perform administrative tasks may emerge. The deployment of such technology in the private and the public sector signals that the time has come for their regulation. The current EU legal framework and proposed legislation for regulating AI is limited in critical ways, as demonstrated by the analysis of the AI Act and positive law in Sect. 3.2. This chapter argues that AI applications employed by the public sector should be subject to a separate risk category for two reasons: first because specific safeguards are necessary in relation to the AI applications in the public sector in order to enhance the legitimacy and accountability of such applications, and second because AI applications in the public sector with access to the lake of data of the state create an unprecedented public resource, which must be safeguarded from malicious incumbents who would be keen to take advantage of such resource for self-entrenchment purposes.Publication Strong economic rights, weak political rights in the EU: a constitutional cacophony(Edward Elgard, 2022-02-11) Kouroutakis, Antonios; Hartzén, Ann Christine; Iossa, Andrea; Karageorgiou, Eleni; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75From a legal and political perspective, the European Union (hereinafter EU) is a very ambitious project. On the one hand, it challenges the hierarchical structure of the ordinary constitutional systems of the Member States; on the other, it distorts the notion of national sovereignty and the unity of the political nature of the nation state. The core achievement of the EU, and its heart, is the Single Market, which allows the free movement of goods, services, capital and workers within the EU. The Single Market was founded in 1986 with the Single European Act, which was the first major revision of the Treaty of Rome and was projected to be established by 1992. In particular, the free movement of workers, which was first established with the Treaty of Rome, is currently a fundamental right guaranteed by the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (hereinafter TFEU).Publication Abuse of Power and Self-Entrenchment as a State Response to the COVID-19 Outbreak: The Role of Parliaments, Courts and the People(SSRN, 2021-06-08) Kouroutakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75The World Health Organization, on March 11th, declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic and while the pandemic is still spreading, and some counties are affected more than others, governments have had to respond, given that SARS-CoV2(Covid-19) poses a serious public health threat. In their responses, governments have adopted emergency measures balancing public health with a plethora of rights such as freedom of movement, right to assembly and freedom to religion. In liberal constitutional theory, the norm is that during emergencies power is concentrated in the hands of the executive. Interestingly due to the nature of the pandemic, in some countries, such as in Hungary, parliamentary sessions were suspended, in others such as in Greece and the UK they were either under function or gone virtually via online platforms respectively. This limited function of the legislative body has grave implications on the quality of modern democracy as parliamentary scrutiny is restricted, ministerial accountability is distorted and most importantly the voice of the opposition does not have an appropriate forum to be heard. On the top of that, a well established stance of deference prevails in the judiciary weakening judicial review as an extra mechanism of protection to monitor the political process. Such constitutional circumstances may give rise to abuse of executive power and application of policies for self-serving purposes and self-entrenchment. For instance, the government may allocate funding in a way to favor its reelection. The aim of this paper it to examine legitimate and illegitimate executive self-entrenchment in times of emergency and identify the role of different institutions, to monitor and scrutinize executive emergency actions.Publication Autonomous vehicles Regulatory Challenges and the Response from UK and Germany(Mitchell Hamline School of law, 2020) Kouroutakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75The looming dominance of autonomous vehicles has an impact on well-established areas of human activity such as the architecture of the cities and the transportation system. At the legal front, laws at the national and international level have become obsolete as technological changes have created new realities. At the same time, such technology development is challenging long established principles of privacy, tort law, civil liability, criminal law, and insurance law. Nowadays a number of countries, like Germany and the UK, have adopted legislation to allow the operation of autonomous vehicles, while others have been more reluctant. Lawmakers, in their effort to meet the fast technological pace, face a number of challenges. The question is how they decide to solve them. This article examines how lawmakers respond to the presence of autonomous vehicles. In particular, it focuses on the recent legal framework adopted by Germany and the UK. By employing comparative methodology, this article evaluates the legislative initiatives from both Germany and the UK and underpins best practices that would be useful for lawmakers who intend to adopt laws regulating autonomous vehicles. Interestingly, the approaches on some core issues, such as the definition, standards, and characteristics of autonomous vehicles and the requirement for human oversight differ, but both legislative bodies decided to enact laws subject to a two-year review, which signals the experimental character of the laws.Publication Public Data, AI Applications and the Transformation of the State: Contemporary Challenges to Democracy(SSRN, 2023-10-06) Kouroutakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75The use of AI applications and their abilities might have an unparallel transformative force on the state and the administration’s relationship with citizens. Their application has the potential to usher in a new paradigm where alternative ways to perform administrative tasks may emerge. The deployment of such technology in the private and the public sector signals that the time has come for their regulation. The current EU legal framework and proposed legislation for regulating AI is limited in critical ways, as demonstrated by the analysis of the AI Act and positive law in the Part A. This article argues that AI applications employed by the public sector should be subject to a separate risk category for two reasons: first because specific safeguards are necessary in relation to the AI applications in the public sector in order to enhance the legitimacy and accountability of such applications, and second because AI applications in the public sector with access to the lake of data of the state create an unprecedented public resource, which must be safeguarded from malicious incumbents who would be keen to take advantage of such resource for self-entrenchment purposes.Publication On the trajectory of discrimination: A meta-analysis and forecasting survey capturing 44 years of field experiments on gender and hiring decisions(Science Direct, 2023-11-10) Kouroutakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75A preregistered meta-analysis, including 244 effect sizes from 85 field audits and 361,645 individual job ap plications, tested for gender bias in hiring practices in female-stereotypical and gender-balanced as well as malestereotypical jobs from 1976 to 2020. A “red team” of independent experts was recruited to increase the rigor and robustness of our meta-analytic approach. A forecasting survey further examined whether laypeople (n = 499 nationally representative adults) and scientists (n = 312) could predict the results. Forecasters correctly antic ipated reductions in discrimination against female candidates over time. However, both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.Publication The Virtues of Sunset Clauses in Relation to Constitutional Authority(Oxford Academic, 2020-02-01) Kouroutakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75This article focuses on the virtues of sunset clauses pertaining to authority. It examines the utility of such clauses in three instances: first, when there is a transfer of constitutional authority; secondly, when there is an exclusively attributed authority, but it is not exercised; and thirdly, when there is a creation of a new authority. In the case of a transfer of authority subject to sunset clauses, unless such authority is re-authorized, the sunset clause brings about its expiration on a prescribed date. In practice, the benefits from the sunset clause are twofold. First, such a clause allows the comprehensive evaluation of the transferred authority, minimizing the risk of any abuse. Secondly, such a clause sets the timetable, which promotes legal certainty. In the case of inactivity while there is an exclusive authority, the use of a sunset clause as an alarm clock creates an incentive for action; or alternatively, with the expiration of the sunset clause, the authority is considered ipso jure and simultaneously exercised. Finally, in the case where new authority is created, such authority may be subject to a sunset clause if it is implemented as a constitutional experiment or if it is controversial in nature because it possibly distorts the system of separation of powers.