International Law

EU Accession to the ECHR

By Bartolus

Article 6 §2 TEU provides that the EU shall accede to the European Convention of Human Rights.

Easier said than done, of course. But now the wheels of accession are in motion.

The Commission has proposed negotiating directives to the Council so that it may conduct the requisite negotiations with the Council of Europe. The Commission has issued this press release and this memo explaining very briefly what it proposes.

Meanwhile, the European Parliament has been busy too. The Committee on Constitutional Affairs has issued this draft report. Interestingly, the draft report considers that no formal mechanism such as a preliminary reference procedure should link the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.

The European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs issued this brief and rather vague draft opinion.

And its Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs issued its own draft opinion.

All of those parliamentary documents will be considered by the Parliament's plenary sometime in the near future.

For a glimpse into how the Council of Europe would see the institutional mechanism to be established after EU accession to the Convention and in particular how the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human rights will interrelate, see this speech here. In it, Mr Serhiy Holovaty, Vice chairperson of the Committee of Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly states that after EU accession, the Court of Justice will be treated as just a "domestic court" over which the Court of Human Rights will exercise "external restraint".

For a previous post on the relationship between the Council of Europe and the EU, see here.

Hat tip to the ECHR blog.

Full post as published by EU Law Blog on April 06, 2010 (boomark / email).