Alida started as a doctoral research fellow in April 2023. She is affiliated with the ENROL project, an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Public and International Law and the ARENA Centre for European Studies, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
She holds a law degree from ELTE in Hungary (2020) and spent one year of her studies in Bergen as an Erasmus exchange student. She has been associated with the University of Bergen and the Christian Michelsen Institute through various engagements, including work as a trainee and research assistant at the Centre on Law and Social Transformation, and through the research project “PROTECT – The Right to International Protection”, funded by the EU’s Horizon programme. She teaches EEA law (part of JUS2211) and international human rights law (part of JUS2111) at the Faculty of Law.
In her dissertation, she examines what it means, as a matter of EU law, to treat the rule of law as a non‑negotiable requirement for membership and how this affects the Union’s dealings with both Member States and candidate countries. Her doctrinal claims establish the basic foundation: that the rule of law is a non‑negotiable membership condition; that the same Article 2 TEU rule of law applies to Member States and candidate countries; that this rule of law constrains as well as enables the EU’s own conduct; and that EU institutions now share, at least on paper, a common textual and doctrinal core of what the rule of law means. On this basis, she argues normatively that consistency in how the rule of law is applied is not just a political ideal but an expectation that stems from the Treaties and from the rule of law itself, and that EU institutions ought to adopt a common and uniform interpretation of the rule of law as a prerequisite for membership, because only then can it be defended without double standards.
A central part of her project is to spell out what “consistency” should mean in this context and what it requires of EU institutions. She starts from the claim that, for the rule of law to materialise and be effective, it needs to be applied consistently, and that, given its status as a foundational principle and a non‑negotiable membership condition in a value‑based legal order, its defence warrants a higher standard and a more rigorous degree of consistency in its protection than what may be expected in other policy areas. From this, she develops the claim that consistency marks the minimal viable level of the EU’s expected rule‑of‑law defence in membership matters: it is the threshold below which the essence of the rule of law is no longer protected. She defines consistency as a combination of (i) the absence of substantive and procedural contradictions and (ii) coherent, logically structured norms and practices that support systemic integrity. On this basis, her dissertation proposes a normative‑doctrinal legal framework and consistency standard that can be used both ex ante—to guide and structure how EU institutions handle rule‑of‑law issues in membership cases—and ex post—to assess, through concrete case studies, whether and how the EU has achieved greater consistency in its defence of the rule of law as a membership criterion since the Lisbon Treaty.
