Have national judges started treating the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights the same way they treat the EC law's norms? In order to answer this question, the editors of this book included scholars from the countries that are members both of the EU and the Council of Europe. The book collects the proceeding of an international conference held January 16-17, 2010, at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa.
The European Convention on Human Rights has evolved into a sophisticated legal system, whose formal reach into the domestic law and politics of the Contracting States is limited only by the ever-widening scope of the Convention itself, as determined by a transnational court. In this book, a team of distinguished scholars trace and evaluate, comparatively, the impact of the ECHR and the European Court of Human Rights on law and politics in eighteen national systems: Ireland-UK; France-Germany, Italy-Spain, Belgium-Netherlands, Norway-Sweden, Greece-Turkey, Russia-Ukraine, Poland-Slovakia, and Austria-Switzerland. Although the Court's jurisprudence has provoked significant structural, procedural, and policy innovation in every State examined, its impact varies widely across States and legal domains. The book charts this variation and seeks to explain it. Across Europe, national officials - in governments, legislatures, and judiciaries - have chosen to incorporate the ECHR into domestic law, and they have developed a host of mechanisms designed to adapt the national legal system to the ECHR as it evolves. But how and why State actors have done so varies in important ways, and these differences heavily determine the relative status and effectiveness of Convention rights in national systems. Although problems persist, the book shows that national officials are, gradually but inexorably, being socialized into a Europe of rights, a unique transnational legal space now developing its own logics of political and juridical legitimacy.
The European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR”) suffers from the burgeoning caseload and challenges to its authority. This two-pronged crisis undermines the ECtHR’s legitimacy and consequently the functioning of the whole European human rights regime. Domestic courts can serve as welcome allies of the Strasbourg Court. They have a potential to diffuse Convention norms domestically, and therefore prevent and filter many potential human rights violations. Yet, we know very little about how domestic courts actually treat the Strasbourg Court’s rulings. This book brings unique empirical findings on how often, how and with what consequences domestic judges work with the ECtHR’s case law. It moves beyond the narrow concept of compliance and develops a new three-level methodology for analysing the role played by domestic courts in the implementation of ECtHR case law. Moreover, using the example of Czechia, it shifts the attention from Western countries to a more volatile Central and Eastern European region, which has recently witnessed democratic backsliding and backlash against international checks on human rights and the rule of law standards. Looking at a wider social and legal context, this book identifies factors helping transitional countries to adapt to regional human rights regimes. The work will be an essential resource for students, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of Constitutional law, Politics and Human Rights law. Its global appeal is enhanced by the methodological framework which is applicable in other international systems.
National Courts and EU Law examines both how and why national courts and judges are involved in the process of legal integration within the European Union. As well as reviewing conventional thinking, the book presents new legal and empirical insights into the issue of judicial behaviour in this process. The expert contributors provide a critical analysis of the key questions, examining the role of national courts in relation to the application of various EU legal instruments.
This is the first comprehensive collection of court decisions dealing exclusively with the relationship between European Community law and the national laws of the Member States. It contains 90 decisions given between 1962 and 1993 by both the Community's Court of Justice (20 cases) and the courts of the 12 Member States (70 cases). The volume includes the recent decisions of national courts concerning the Maastricht Treaty. Key recurring topics of the decisions are the supremacy and direct effect of Community law, its impact on national sovereignty and constitutional rights, and the remedies available before national courts for its enforcement. All the texts are presented in English, having been translated wherever necessary. Each decision is preceded by a concise summary and key-word heading. The volume also includes a systematic introduction, digest of key-word headings, table of cases, and detailed index.
The law and politics of European integration have been inseparable since the 1960s, when the European Court of Justice rendered a set of foundational decisions that gradually served to 'constitutionalize' the Treaty of Rome. In this book, Alec Stone Sweet, one of the world's foremost social scientists and legal scholars, blends deductive theory, quantitative analysis of aggregate data, and qualitative case studies to explain the dynamics of European integration and institutional change in the EU since 1959. He shows that the activities of market actors, lobbyists, legislators, litigators, and judges became connected to one another in various ways, giving the EU its fundamentally expansionary character. He then assesses the impact of Europe's unique legal system on the evolution of supranational governance, tracing outcomes in three policy domains: free movement of goods, sex equality, and environmental protection. The book integrates diverse themes, including: the testing of hypotheses derived from regional integration theory; the 'judicialization' of legislative processes; the path dependence of precedent and legal argumentation; the triumph of the 'rights revolution' in the EU; delegation, agency, and trusteeship; balancing as a technique of judicial rulemaking and governance; and why national administration and justice have been steadily 'Europeanized'. Written for a broad audience, the book is also recommended for use in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in law and the social sciences.
The preliminary reference procedure under Article 267 TFEU is the keystone of the EU judicial system and its legal order. Based on a dialogue between the Court of Justice and national courts, it is strictly linked to the protection of the rights that individuals derive from EU law. This book focuses on this procedure from the perspective of the right to effective judicial protection, in light of Article 19(1), second subparagraph, TEU and Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. It explores the level of protection that is ensured to individuals in order to access to the Court of Justice through preliminary references on the validity of EU acts and on the interpretation of EU law. The book offers a threefold perspective on preliminary references, through an analysis of the case law of the Court of Justice itself, of the European Court of Human Rights in relation to Article 6(1) ECHR, and of the constitutional courts of Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain, where the national courts’ refusals to refer can lead to the violation of national constitutional rights. It further investigates the obligations for Member States and national courts in the framework of the preliminary reference procedure and how the right to effective judicial protection affects them. The examination outlines the implications that could flow from the recognition of a right for individuals to have a question referred to the ECJ, as part of the right to effective judicial protection under EU law, in particular its nature and its enforcement. Building upon the existing system of sanctions for the violations of the obligation to submit a preliminary question, the book advances some proposals to rethink the current system of remedies.
Legality is a traditional normative concept to regulate the relationship between those in power and those subjected to that power. The principle of legality protects the citizen against the arbitrary use of power, or, more precisely, it demands a legal basis (which itself must be of a certain standard) to legitimize State action. Is legality under siege in Europe? The authors contributing to this provocative and important book answer this question in the affirmative. Twenty-one outstanding European legal scholars expose a spectrum of ways in which the traditional legality principle is under pressure because of the creation of new legal orders, including that of the EU, and the interaction between these new orders and that of the State, combined with such factors as expertise driven governance, difficulties of international organizations to meet their objectives due to a lack of adequate powers, and lack of parliamentary control. The question of whether the main functions of legality - legitimating, attributing and regulating the exercise of public authority - are still fulfilled in the context of the overlapping, interacting, and mutually dependent legal orders of the EU, the ECHR, and the Member States is at the background of all the essays in this volume. Recognizing that legality, if it is to survive, demands rigorous reconsideration of its scope and application, the authors interrogate not only such fundamental democratic issues as who has legitimate power to perform legislative acts and through these to exercise of public power over citizens, but also such urgent European problems as the following: ; the use of the precautionary principle in EU decision-making; the scope of the principle that the exercise of public authority must rest on an act of Parliament; the extent to which the EU can provide a legal basis for action of Member State authorities in the absence of such a basis within Member State legal orders; the constitutional position of independent 'regulators'; the requirements that ECJ and ECHR case law impose on the exercise of public authority; whether legislative results are coherent in the sensitive area of equal treatment; transparency, legal certainty, enforceability, and implementation of EC Directives in the field of workers' involvement; new instruments as the Open Method of Coordination and the involvement of social partners in decision-making; the de facto harmonization of national criminal justice systems; and the prominent role of the EU in the field of data protection. There can be little doubt that the issue of legality and to whom it applies - in a world in which the role of the modern State is changing profoundly - is a crucial one. It is highly important in the context of the ongoing discussion on the meaning of democracy and citizenship. This volume, with its clear message that reconsidering legality demands taking serious issue with the uncertainty engendered by the processes of globalization, will resonate profoundly among practitioners and policymakers in this time of momentous change.
This collection of essays originated in a series of seminars given at the summer courses of the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute, Florence in 1999.
