EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

Prague, Czechia

for all insurances, which now costs 4 times more per person. There are obvious negative psychological consequences for children who have already gone to school, kindergarten here and, within a period absorb Czech culture and become acclimatised. Besides, they had strong psychological stress during the pandemic, and finally, they would be forced to leave the country. The movement of Czech politics towards the division of people into “native/alien”, an unequal attitude towards care for the psychological health of foreign residents, their children, and the Czech population, as well as the division of people according to their financial capabilities, removes the country from social equality. In addition, the purpose of the Czech authorities probably goes beyond the financial and insurance context. Using the method of discursive analysis, we can pay attention that during the vote for amendments to the law, one of the theses in support of it was that if it was not adopted, it would mean “again opening the door to migration”, which seems to allude to existing anti-migrant sentiment in the Czech Republic (Bauerová, 2018). This sentiment is also confirmed by the fact that in 2018 the Czech Republic voted against The Global Compact for Migration at the General Assembly of United Nations despite this Compact being just a political declaration, not a legally binding treaty (IOM, 2020, p. 296). But it is not the concern for the health of migrants that is the content and purpose of the analysed changes. The Czech Republic cast doubt on its status as “European”, because the protection from monopolies, the single market and the right to free choice are values of the EU. Also, under Art. 2 TEU the value of the EU is “respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”, but Czechia wants to assume migrants only as employees and does not want to protect family relationships, by producing barriers for unemployed family members, including children and students. European values depend on the rule of law which delivers confidence in predictability (May, 2018, p. 385). Moreover, it is known that respect for “the principles of representative democracy, of the rule of law and social justice” is a condition for membership in the EU (Janse, 2019, p. 345). Nevertheless, today we can see a value crisis affects the entire Union – not only one Member State – and therefore calls for answers on the Union level (Mader, 2019, p. 165). The problem of violating EU values is related to correlating the interests of the state, expressed in the adopted legislative acts, with the EU regulations, which have been unprecedentedly questioned in recent days (not only in the Czech Republic but also in the recently adopted court decision of Poland). It is noteworthy that States violating EU law use non-formalistic, nontraditional and misleading arguments with baseless, vague or insufficient information. In that case, it is right that the effectiveness of current rule of law initiatives, which

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