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Time: Friday, 14 October 2022 at 1:00pm - 2:00pm (UTC+3)
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https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/66658879246?pwd=WnB3MWorWVZMa0o3TWZ6R0tZT1BTUT09
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Peoples, Inhabitants and Workers: Colonialism in the Treaty of Rome
The Treaty of Rome, which is the legal foundation of what is today the European Union, was negotiated and drafted during the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) of 1956-57. In 1957, four out of six of the future Member States were colonial powers: France; Belgium; the Netherlands; and Italy. This presentation interrogates the ways in which colonial politics conditioned the construction of the EU law categories of ‘peoples’, ‘workers’ and ‘inhabitants’.
The origin of the European Union provides a conspicuously unexplored example of how post WW2 international organisations arranged their legal categories to exclude individuals who lived in colonised territories from legal benefits and representation, while constructing trade and investment law to extract resources from those very same territories. The ultimate focus of this presentation is on identifying ways these built-in legal practises remain unresolved and reproduced today.
About the speaker:
Hanna Eklund is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Copenhagen. She was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Sciences Po Law School in Paris and holds a Ph.D. in European Law from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (2016). In 2020 she was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for the project ‘An Ever Closer Union Among the Peoples of Europe: A Critical Legal History (EPoCH)’.