Accession Revisited: Will Fundamental Rights Protection Trump the European Union's Legal Autonomy?
Wolfgang Benedek, Florence Benoît-Rohmer, Wolfram Karl, and Manfred Nowak (eds.), European Yearbook on Human Rights, 2011 (NWV 2011) pp. 167ff
13 Pages Posted: 25 Nov 2012
Date Written: July 1, 2011
Abstract
Over the years, many objections have been raised against the EU's accession to the ECHR and its possible legal consequences, most notably the risks for the autonomy of the EU’s specific legal system and the incompatibility of the subordination of the ECJ to the European Court of Human Rights. This paper will first deal with some general legal aspects of the EU’s legal autonomy in relation to the accession to the ECHR. Particularly, it will examine the exact meaning of the term "legal autonomy of the EU", and whether and how this autonomy could be at risk; it will address the EU’s legal autonomy in relation to the ECtHR’s human rights protection, especially by examining the challenges individual citizens may face when lodging applications against an alleged fundamental rights violator and the ensuing complexities of identifying the right respondent when a member state has implemented EU law; and second, what further complexities for individual applicants might arise within the EU’s system of preliminary reference procedures and how these issues might be solved on the basis of the so-called co-respondent model.
Keywords: Accession, EU, ECHR, European Court of Justice, European Court of Human Rights, individual applications, preliminary ruling procedure, autonomy of EU law
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