After a
range of articles on the issue, a monograph has now been published on the EU’s
forthcoming accession to the ECHR. The book, written by Paul Gragl of the City University of London, is entitled
‘The Accession of the European Union to the European Convention on Human Rights’ (Hart Publishing). This is the abstract:
After more
than 30 years of discussion, negotiations between the Council of Europe and the
European Union on the EU’s accession to the European Convention on Human Rights
have resulted in a Draft Accession Agreement. This will allow the EU to accede
to the Convention within the next couple of years. As a consequence, the Union
will become subject to the external judicial supervision of an international
treaty regime. Individuals will also be entitled to submit applications against
the Union, alleging that their fundamental rights have been violated by legal
acts rooted in EU law, directly to the Strasbourg Court.
As the
first comprehensive monograph on this topic, this book examines the concerns
for the EU’s legal system in relation to accession and the question of whether
and how accession and the system of human rights protection under the
Convention can be effectively reconciled with the autonomy of EU law. It also
takes into account how this objective can be attained without jeopardising the
current system of individual human rights protection under the Convention. The
main chapters deal with the legal status and rank of the Convention and the
Accession Agreement within Union law after accession; the external review of EU
law by Strasbourg and the potential subordination of the Luxembourg Court; the
future of individual applications and the so-called co-respondent mechanism;
the legal arrangement of inter-party cases after accession and the presumable
clash of jurisdictions between Strasbourg and Luxembourg; and the interplay
between the Convention’s subsidiarity principle (the exhaustion of local
remedies) and the prior involvement of the Luxembourg Court in EU-related
cases.
The
analysis presented in this book comes at a crucial point in the history of
European human rights law, offering a holistic and detailed enquiry into the
EU’s accession to the ECHR and how this move can be reconciled with the
autonomy of EU law.
