"In this book, Mark Dawson looks at the mechanisms through which EU fundamental rights are protected and enforced, closely examining the inter-relation between the EU's pertinent legal and political bodies"--

This book represents the first attempt to examine how EU fundamental rights are protected and enforced by EU governing bodies.

The first book to examine the creation and function of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency.

This monograph offers a longitudinal analysis of the developments in the European fundamental rights arena during the last decade. Decisions of critical importance on the future of the EU need to be taken by the EU institutions and the Member States' governments. The ‘existential’ crisis affecting Europe is essentially a crisis of values revealing a lack of shared vision. Based on this premise, this monograph contributes to the debate on how to overcome the current impasse. By situating the analysis of the EU in the context of a wider Europe, which includes the ECHR (and its interpretation by the ECtHR), this work challenges the idea that the project of European integration should be abandoned. Instead it proposes a re-orientation of this process, conceptualised as a dynamic interaction of different actors, sources and laws on fundamental rights within the wider Europe. Following an evaluation of the current fundamental rights’ regimes, the monograph proposes a model of effective governance of fundamental rights in Europe based on the doctrines of dialogical constitutionalism and agency. This original and innovative contribution is enriched by findings from British Academy funded research on the European architecture of fundamental rights post-Lisbon Treaty.

An accessible and interdisciplinary take on EU law and governance, situating EU law in its political, social and cultural context.

This book explores the coming into being in European Union (EU) law of the fundamental right to personal data protection. Approaching legal evolution through the lens of law as text, it unearths the steps that led to the emergence of this new right. It throws light on the right’s significance, and reveals the intricacies of its relationship with privacy. The right to personal data protection is now officially recognised as an EU fundamental right. As such, it is expected to play a critical role in the future European personal data protection legal landscape, seemingly displacing the right to privacy. This volume is based on the premise that an accurate understanding of the right’s emergence is crucial to ensure its correct interpretation and development. Key questions addressed include: How did the new right surface in EU law? How could the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights claim to render ‘more visible’ an invisible right? And how did EU law allow for the creation of a new right while ensuring consistency with existing legal instruments and case law? The book first investigates the roots of personal data protection, studying the redefinition of privacy in the United States in the 1960s, as well as pioneering developments in European countries and in international organisations. It then analyses the EU’s involvement since the 1970s up to the introduction of legislative proposals in 2012. It grants particular attention to changes triggered in law by language and, specifically, by the coexistence of languages and legal systems that determine meaning in EU law. Embracing simultaneously EU law’s multilingualism and the challenging notion of the untranslatability of words, this work opens up an inspiring way of understanding legal change. This book will appeal to legal scholars, policy makers, legal practitioners, privacy and personal data protection activists, and philosophers of law, as well as, more generally, anyone interested in how law works.

Shall the adoption of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights lead the European Union to develop an active fundamental rights policy? Rather than asking the classical question of which initiatives need to be taken by the Union in order to improve the protection of fundamental rights, this paper argues in favour of the establishment of a mechanism which would ensure a form of permanent learning between the Member States, in order to encourage progress in the direction of the further realisation of fundamental rights as recognised in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, irrespective of whether this takes the form of legislative developments at the level of the Union. What is advocated here has already been experimented with in certain areas--such as health care, the rights of the child, or, to a limited extent, asylum and immigration. This paper asks whether this should be generalised, and become a permanent component of governance in the EU. It envisages the future of fundamental rights in the European Union as based on a view of rights as having to be permanently reinvented in the new settings in which they are invoked, and as objectives (or 'values') the fulfilment of which requires a permanent learning process, both (horizontally) between the Member States and (vertically) between the institutions of the Union and the Member States.