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Opinion 2/13 of the Court (C.J.E.U.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Daniel Halberstam
Daniel Halberstam*
Affiliation:
Eric Stein Collegiate, European Legal Studies Program, University of Michigan Law School
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Extract

Opinion 2/13 of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared the draft agreement on European Union accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) incompatible with the Treaty on European Union. The Opinion comes toward the end of a long and gradual process of incorporating human and fundamental rights principles into the legal system of the European Community and its successor, the European Union. Opinion 2/13 sends the Commission back to the drawing board on what has long been seen as the capstone of that process—EU accession to the Strasbourg human rights regime as an external check on human rights protection within the European Union.

Type
International Legal Materials
Information
International Legal Materials , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 267 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2016

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References

* This text was reproduced and reformatted from the text available at the Court of Justice of the European Union website (visited March 15, 2016), http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=160882&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=193413.

1 Case C-2/13, Opinion 2/13 of the Court, EUR-Lex -62013CV0002 (Dec. 18, 2014).

2 Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community art. 119, Mar. 25, 1957, 298 U.N.T.S. 11 (now Consolidated Version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union art. 157, Dec. 13, 2007, 2008 O.J. (C 115) 47) [hereinafter TFEU].

3 Case 26/62, Van Gend en Loos v. Netherlands Inland Revenue Administration, 1963 E.C.R. 1; Case 6/64, Flaminio Costa v. E.N.E.L., 1964 E.C.R. 585.

4 See, e.g., Case 29/69, Erich Stauder v. City of Ulm, 1963 E.C.R. 165; Case 11/70, Internationale Handelsgesellschaft mbH v. Einfuhr- und Vorratsstelle für Getreide und Futtermittel, 1970 E.C.R. 1125.

5 E.g., Case 4/73, J. Nold, Kohlen- und Bausstoffgro_handlung v. Commission of the European Communities, 1974 E.C.R. 491.

6 See, e.g., Case 44/79, Liselotte Hauer v. Land Rheinland-Pfalz, 1979 E.C.R. 3727.

7 The preamble of the Single European Act of 1986 expressed the determination to “work together to promote democracy on the basis of fundamental rights recognized in the constitutions and laws of the Member States, in the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the European Social Charter . . . .”

8 Treaty on European Union art. F(2), Feb. 7, 1992, 1992 O.J. (C 191), 31 I.L.M. 253.

9 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union art. 52(3), Mar. 30, 2010, 2010 O.J. (C 83) 389.

10 Accession of the Communities to the European Convention on Human Rights-Commission Memorandum, 1979 O.J. (C 127) 69 (EU).

11 This would include, for example, the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on European Community.

12 Case 2/94, Opinion Pursuant To Article 228 of the EC Treaty, 1996 E.C.R. 1783.

13 Id. ¶¶ 34–35.

14 The Treaty of Lisbon went into effect in 2009.

15 TFEU, supra note 2, art. 344, protocol 8.

16 Council Document of 17 September 2010, 13714/10.

17 See, e.g., Steve Peers, The CJEU and the EU’s Accession to the ECHR: A Clear and Present Danger to Human Rights Protection, EU law analysis Blog (Dec. 18, 2014), http://eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/12/thecjeu-and-eus-accession-to-echr.html; Piet Eeckhout, Opinion 2/13 on EU Accession to the ECHR and Judicial Dialogue:Autonomy or Autarky, 38 Fordham Int’l L.J. 955 (2015).

18 See, e.g., Catherine Barnard, Opinion 2/13 on EU Accession to the ECHR: Looking for the Silver Linings, EU Law analysis Blog (Feb. 16, 2015), http://eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/2015/02/opinion-213-on-euaccession-to-echr.html; Jean Paul Jaqué, Non à l’adhésion à la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme?, Droit de l’Union Europé enne (Dec. 23, 2014), http://www.droit-union-europeenne.be/412337458; Daniel Halberstam, “It’s the Autonomy, Stupid!” A Modest Defense of Opinion 2/13 on EU Accession to the ECHR, and a Way Forward, 16 German L. J. 105 (2015).

19 TFEU, supra note 2, art. 218(11).

20 Dean Spielmann, Foreword to Annual Report of the European Court of Human Rights 6 (2014), available at http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Annual_Report_2014_ENG.pdf.

21 Id.