ERA (Europäische Rechtsakademie – European Law Academy) was founded in 1992 and is established since its creation in Trier (Germany).
The objective of the Academy of European Law Trier is to enable individuals and authorities involved in the application and implementation of European law in Member States and in other European States interested in close co-operation with the European Union gaining a wider knowledge of European law, in particular European Union law and its application and to make possible a mutual and comprehensive exchange of experiences.
The Academy pursues this objective by organising courses, conferences, seminars and specialist symposia, particularly for the purposes of continuous, by issuing publications and by providing a forum for discussions.
ERA held its 30th Anniversary Congress on 13-14 October 2022 in Trier with personal messages from Jean-Claude Juncker, President of ERA’s Governing Board, Malu Dreyer, Minister President of Rhineland-Palatinate (via video message), Sabine Verheyen, Chair of the European Parliament Committee on Culture and Education, and Marc van der Woude, President of the General Court of the European Union.
The congress was entitled “European Sovereignty: The Legal Dimension – A Union in Control of its own Destiny”. After the opening ceremony, eminent speakers as Koen Lenaerts, President of the Court of Justice of the European Union took the floor to speak about the judicial sovereignty of the European Union and the possible extension of the competences of the Union through the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice.
During the second day of the conference, different panels were proposed to the participants: Strategic sovereignty, budgetary and fiscal sovereignty, and digital sovereignty of the European Union.
The conference was closed in plenary session with a panel discussion about the democratic organization of European sovereignty: shared tasks of the Member States and the Union? On this high-level panel, Christophe Hansen, member and quaestor of the European Parliament, Vera Jourová, Vice President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Junker, former President of the European Commission, and former Prime Minister of Luxembourg, and Egils Levits, President of the Republic of Latvia, as well as Marian Cătălin Predoiu, Minister of Justice of Romania and Tibor Navracsics, Minister for Regional Development and EU Funds of Hungary (both by video conference) participated.
A joint meeting of the ERA Board of Trustees, of which Marc SCHMITZ, president of the UIHJ and the UEHJ is a member since this year, and the Governing Board has been organized before the official opening of the conference.
UEHJ will be actively involved in a training project co-funded by the EU that will start in December 2022.
The ERA is currently managed by Jean-Philippe Rageade, director.
