Felix Ronkes Agerbeek delivers Opening Lecture at the LL.M. European Law Opening Ceremony
On Friday 12 September 2025, the Opening Ceremony of the European Law LL.M. programme took place in the Lorentz lecture hall at Leiden Law School. Following Dr Barbora Budinska’s and Professor Armin Cuyvers’s warm words of welcome for the incoming students, Dr Darinka Piqani presented two student prizes.
The first prize, for the best paper in ‘Europa in de Praktijk’, an elective bachelor’s course, went to Sjoukje Kraak for her paper ‘Een constitutionele aardbeving: De inzet van artikel 2 VEU als zelfstandige rechtsgrond en de potentiële hertekening van het machtslandschap binnen de Europese Unie’. The second prize, the Europa Institute Thesis Award, went to Noemi Zenk-Agyei for her LL.M. thesis entitled ‘Between Borders and Burdens – Assessing the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and its Compliance with the Principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities in its Application to African Exporters’.
The Opening Lecture was delivered by Felix Ronkes Agerbeek, a member of the Legal Service of the European Commission. His lecture, titled ‘Courts, Fundamental Rights, and the European Union's Role in the World’, centred on the Court of Justice’s landmark judgment in C-29/22 P - KS and KD v Council and Others. Through the personal stories of the two applicants in the case, two women who lost their family members in the aftermath of the Kosovo War and whose repeated requests for investigation by EULEX Kosovo went unanswered, Ronkes Agerbeek reflected on the tensions between the limited jurisdiction of the Court of Justice in matters of Common Foreign and Security Policy and the imperative to protect the fundamental rights of individuals affected by EU external action. He also discussed the broader question of the role of courts in foreign affairs, the interplay between the case law of the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, and the ongoing negotiations on the accession of the European Union to the European Convention on Human Rights. The lecture was followed by an engaging Q&A session. The ceremony closed with a drinks reception.