The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in the light of the principle of unity in diversity (Part I) (original) (raw)
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Facta Universitatis, Series: Law and Politics
The EU system for the protection of fundamental rights had been developing since 1969 until the date of entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, which established three areas for the protection of human rights. The first is based on the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the second refers to the general principle, as emphasized by the Court of Justice in its case law in the 1970s. The last area is the future one and it assumes strengthening the protection of fundamental rights within the Council of Europe system by obliging the EU to join the ECHR.The Charter of Fundamental Rights initially had the status of an inter-institutional agreement, which acquired binding force only under the Treaty of Lisbon. Currently, it is a document with normative power equal to primary law. Each of the Member States is bound by the provisions of the Charter within the scope of EU competences and when implementing the EU law. Poland and the United Kingdom are additionally parties to Protocol No. 30, which...
2007
The 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union recognizes the right to asylum in article 18. Once the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon enters into force, the Charter will become legally binding and its provisions will have treaty rank within the Union's legal order. Compliance with the Charter will then be a requirement for the validity and legality of the Union's secondary legislation, including Directives and Regulations in the field of asylum. This article traces the roots of article 18 back to article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and argues that the right to be granted asylum has become a subjective and enforceable right of individuals under the Union's legal order. The article examines the legal nature, interpretation, scope of application, and enforceability of article 18 of the Charter on the right to asylum in the Union's legal order. It concludes that the beneficiaries of this provision are all individuals who fall under the scope of application of the Union's law, whose international protection grounds are established by international human rights law, including the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. The Charter, as a regional supranational instrument, reinforces the protection of asylum in international law by bringing Europe into line with other regional developments that recognize not only the right to seek, but also the right to be granted, asylum. On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, more than two-thirds of the States Parties to the Refugee Convention are also bound by a rule of international or supranational law to grant asylum.
The aim of the paper is to trace the development line of EU regulations on human rights protection and their current status. To achieve this, the author analyses EU’s most important document on human rights protection – the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (dogmatic-legal method). The considerations will also include case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which – through its law-shaping decisions in particular cases of the interpretation of EU law on human rights protection – has not only determined the general importance of these norms but in many cases also contributed to the creation of new standards of protection. The research also incorporates a theoretical-legal approach insofar as the doctrine is used to strengthen the laid out argument. The starting point for this paper is a thesis on the inclusion of human rights protection to the very idea of European integration through the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The discussion ends with a conclusion on the evolutionary nature of the system of human rights protection, which corresponds with the tendency to deepen the processes of European integration and which has elevated the legal status of individuals, quite often at the expense of the discretion of Member States.
2011
After a short presentation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and its features, the paper is focused on the European Union"s accession to the European Convention of Human Rights. As part of the Treaty of Lisbon implementation, this process is not an easy one. The author intends to identify and raise questions on this process, and to emphasise some technical and procedural difficulties, by comparing the two main European human rights systems. Europe has to face many changes and challenges: the recent entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, the "new status" of the Charter of fundamental rights (as a legally binding instrument) and the beginning of the process of EU"s accession to the European Convention of Human Rights. This paper is intended to point out some aspects of this new era of the European construction.
Human Rights in Europe: Commentary on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union
2010
Human rights in Europe : commentary on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union / William B.T. Mock, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-59460-648-9 (alk. paper) 1. Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000) 2. Civil rights-European Union countries. 3. Human rights-European Union countries. I. Mock, William B.T. II. Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000) III. Title.
Fundamental Human Rights in the European Union
2014
The author of this paper examines the process of development of the fundamental rights protection in the European Union. Firstly, he applies the historical method by explaining how and why in the beginning the European Communities did not engage with fundamental rights. Later on, the development of the notion of human rights as part of the European Community law is exposed first in the case law of the Court of Justice, which was subsequently codified through Treaty reforms in the 1990s and 2000s. Likewise, stress is put on the research of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, its structure, place in the Union law and legal standing. In the end, the difficult process of the European Union’s accession to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms is explored, alongside with the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence with regard to the European Union.
German Law Journal, 2020
The EU’s limited powers do not enable its institutions to effectively intervene in cases where Member State actions threaten fundamental values. The recent controversies emerging from some Member States’ human rights and rule of law backsliding turned this question to one of the core issues of the European project, calling for effective fundamental rights protection in the EU without suppressing national constitutional identities. Though EU law’s approach, at least at first glance, might appear to be idiosyncratic, it is far from unprecedented and, as far as multilevel constitutionalism is concerned, EU law may draw on the experiences of various regimes where centralized human rights protection and national or state constitutional identities coexist. This Article analyzes the current European approach as to the application of the federal bill of rights to states from a comparative perspective and explores the constitutional and jurisprudential patterns addressing the question of inq...
Baltic Journal of European Studies, 2020
The question of the application and impact of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU ('Charter') in quotidian practice of human rights protection and review is a strategic one. Given the predominantly decentralised effects of EU law and with the due account to the wide interpretation of the scope of the Charter's application (Art. 51(1)) presented by the CJEU (C-617/10 Fransson), the national dimension of the application of the Charter forms the crucial issue for the functioning of the EU system of fundamental rights protection. The Charter itself has a big potential to infl uence the content, nature and mechanisms of the fundamental rights protection at the national level. The present paper focuses on this phenomena in connection to the case-law, opinions and workload of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal ('TK'). It analyses the approach of TK towards the Charter in abstract manner as well as the (non)appearance of the Charter in the reasoning of the court in concrete cases. The article reports on the main cases and analyses the reasons of the aloof approach of the TK towards the EU human rights catalogue.