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 book gives insight into the structures and developments of the fundamental rights protection in Europe which is effective at the levels of the national Constitutions, the European Convention of Human Rights and, for the EU member States of the EU Fundamental Rights Charter. The contributions of renowned academics from various European countries demonstrate the functional interconnection of these protection systems which result in an increasing convergence. Basic questions are reflected, such as human dignity as foundation of fundamental rights or positive action as a specific form of equality as well as the concept of rights convergence. In this latter contribution the forms of direct reception of a different legal order and of the functional transfer of principles and concepts are analyzed. Particular reference is made to the EU Charter, the United Kingdom Human Rights Act as well as to France and Germany. It becomes obvious how important interpretation is for the harmonization of national and conventional fundamental rights protection. Traditional institutional approaches like the dualist transformation concept in Germany are functionally set aside in the harmonization process through constitutional interpretation. Specific studies are dedicated to the field of the EU Fundamental Rights Charter and to the European impacts on the national fundamental rights protection in selected countries such as the “new democracies” Poland, Romania and Kosovo as well as more traditional systems such as Spain, Italy, the Nordic countries or Turkey.

A few years have passed since the Lisbon Treaty came into force but the question still remains of what the Lisbon Treaty has actually brought about. Was it just 'relatively insignificant' as some scholars have claimed, or was it 'something' more? This book sets out to look at this question and it does so by applying a classical division: polity, politics and policy. One of the book's conclusions is that the Lisbon Treaty might have been 'plan b' compared to the aborted Constitutional Treaty, but it is certainly a substantial step forward on the European path of integration. The Lisbon Treaty strengthened the EU both as a polity (its stateness), and in its politics (the rules and procedures) and in spite of the fact that the treaty was not really a 'policy treaty', it has extended the Union's field by federalizing most of the policies within the area of Justice and Home Affairs. This anthology brings together scholars from four European countries each of them a specialist within the fields they are analyzing. Each scholar adds insights from their area of competence to the book, leaving it an important contribution to the study of today's European Union.

This book revisits, in a new light, some of the classic cases which constitute the foundations of the EU legal order and is timed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rome Treaty establishing a European Economic Community. Its broader purpose, however, is to discuss the future of the EU legal order by examining, from a variety of different perspectives, the most important judgments of the ECJ which established the foundations of the EU legal order. The tone is neither necessarily celebratory nor critical, but relies on the viewpoint of the distinguished line-up of contributors - drawn from among former and current members of the Court (the view from within), scholars from other disciplines or lawyers from other legal orders (the view from outside), and two different generations of EU legal scholars (the classics revisit the classics and a view from the future). Each of these groups will provide a different perspective on the same set of selected judgments. In each short essay, questions such as 'what would have EU law been without this judgment of the Court? what factors might have influenced it?; did the judgment create expectations which were not fully fulfilled?' and so on, are posed and answered. The result is a profound, wide-ranging and fresh examination of the 'founding cases' of EU law.

Article 6 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) provides that the EU will accede to the system of human rights protection of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Protocol No 9 in the Treaty of Lisbon opens the way for accession. This represents a major change in the relationship between two organisations that have co-operated closely in the past, though the ECHR has hitherto exercised only an indirect constitutional control over the EU legal order through scrutiny of EU Member States. The accession of the EU to the ECHR is expected to put an end to the informal dialogue, and allegedly also competition between the two regimes in Europe and to establish formal (both normative and institutional) hierarchies. In this new era, some old problems will be solved and new ones will appear. Questions of autonomy and independence, of attribution and allocation of responsibility, of co-operation, and legal pluralism will all arise, with consequences for the protection of human rights in Europe. This book seeks to understand how relations between the two organisations are likely to evolve after accession, and whether this new model will bring more coherence in European human rights protection. The book analyses from several different, yet interconnected, points of view and relevant practice the draft Accession Agreement, shedding light on future developments in the ECHR and beyond. Contributions in the book span classic public international law, EU law and the law of the ECHR, and are written by a mix of legal and non-legal experts from academia and practice.