The Flemish and unionist baron of the CJEU who sets the path for Llarena and Marchena
Koen Lenaerts is the president of the Luxembourg court and who read the ruling that endorses the amnesty
BrusselsThe grand chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is made up of 15 judges, but the most influential magistrate and the most visible face – reads the verdicts, such as the one backing the amnesty– is the president of the court of Luxembourg, Koen Lenaerts (Mortsel, 1954). A Fleming with a great academic and professional career, especially in European justice.
He has been president of the CJEU since 2015, and joined the European courts in 1984. He has not stopped rising, moving from legal advisor to judge of the Court of First Instance of Luxembourg, and later, to judge and vice-president of the CJEU. All this, without leaving universities: he has worked and collaborated with the University of Leuven, Harvard, and, among others, the College of Europe in Bruges.
In fact, he enjoys great prestige in the academic world and is an honorary doctor at twelve universities, including Bucharest, Dublin, and Bologna. The last institution to award him this honorary title was the Autonomous University of Barcelona, last year.
As recorded in Lenaerts' declaration of interests at the CJEU, the president of the court also works and is a member of the editorial boards of almost thirty specialized law journals worldwide. And, in the past, as the author himself recalled in the biography of some of his books, he was part of the Coudenberg Group, which was an entity that brought together Belgian unionist intellectuals and advocated for maintaining the federal state of Belgium against the secessionist aspirations of Flanders.
Later, Lenaerts, who has six daughters and speaks five languages fluently, became a nobleman and in 2005 received the title of baron from the Belgian royalty, which is one of the highest symbols of the unity of the Belgian state. Despite his unionism, he showed himself to be very firm in favor of the amnesty and has clearly pointed out the way forward to Supreme Court judges Manuel Marchena and Pablo Llarena, who refuse to apply it.
