2023 – 2024 Chair
In 2023-2024 the Ganshof van der Meersch Chair was held by Catherine Barnard, Professor of EU Law and Employment Law at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College.
Catherine Barnard, FBA, FLSW, FRSA, is the author of EU Employment Law (Oxford, OUP, 2012), The Substantive Law of the EU: The Four Freedoms (Oxford, OUP, 2022), and (with Peers ed) European Union Law (Oxford, OUP, 2023). She is a member of the European Commission funded European Labour Law Network (ELLN). She is also a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe (UKCE), a non-partisan think-tank which does research and provides information about all aspects of Brexit to the general public. She has appeared on the main media channels – BBC, ITV and Sky – as well as some of the more specialist programmes such as Law in Action, Woman’s Hour, Question Time, Any Questions and the Briefing Room. She has also written for the Guardian and the Telegraph. She has given evidence to numerous select committees on the legal issues connected with Brexit. She has her own podcast, 2903cb, and she blogs on Brexit, mainly for UK in a Changing Europe.
As part of the Chair, Prof. Catherine Barnard gave a public lecture titled “What happens when enforcement doesn’t happen: EU law, free movement and… Great Yarmouth” on February 7, 2024.
Abstract of the lecture
In this talk Professor Catherine Barnard looked at the growing emphasis on enforcement as part of upholding the rule of law, how free movement of persons provides a good case study of non-enforcement, and as a case study, the experiences of EU migrant workers in Great Yarmouth, a declining seaside resort with the fifth highest leave vote in the UK, where we see significant under-enforcement of employment rights in a legal aid desert. The question then is what do the workers do to get help, is it effective and are there lessons for labour enforcement more generally?.
