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The European Union and Human Rights after the Treaty of Lisbon
The Lisbon Treaty and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union
The Process of Adoption of the Charter of Fundamental Rights
The First Convention and the Charter of Fundamental Rights
In this context, the European Council in Cologne in 1999 commissioned 23 a Draft Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union from a body composed of representatives of the Heads of State and Government and of the President of the Commission, as well as of members of the European Parliament and national parliaments, including representatives of the European Court of Justice as observers. Representatives of the Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions and social groups, as well as experts were given an opportunity to express their views. This body, constituted in December 1999, titled itself ‘the European Convention’ and was chaired by Roman Herzog. The objective was to present a Draft Charter at the European Council in December 2000, which would then be proposed to the European Parliament and the Commission. Together with the Council, they would then solemnly proclaim a European Charter of Fundamental Rights on the basis of the draft document.
Lisbon Treaty Q & A: your guide to what it means and what happens next
THE ACCESSION TO THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS: A MEANS TO PROTECT VALUES AGAINST (ECONOMIC) OBJECTIVES
Due to the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, the consolidated Treaty on European Union now provides that ‘the Union shall accede to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms’.43
The accession of the ECHR constitutes a more far-reaching step in the constitutional recognition of fundamental rights within the European Union. In my view, it goes beyond a recognition of fundamental rights as mere general principles of EU law. In fact, Article 6(3) TEU as such already recognises such an impact of fundamental rights, as guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. It goes beyond the effect of the reference to the CFREU within the TEU.
THE CFREU AND THE ISSUE OF VALUES
The CFREU as a Source of Fundamental Rights
No reflection on the values of the European Union can be undertaken without a thorough analysis of the CFREU. As indicated by Kenner, 18 there is an obvious overlap between the CFREU and the Constitutional Treaty in identifying the values concerned. The overlap is twofold. First, Article 2 TEU stresses the value of ‘respect for human rights’, whereas the CFREU contains a catalogue of ‘fundamental rights’. The semantic difference between both categories is slightly puzzling. Furthermore, within the CFREU a relationship between fundamental rights and major concepts is established by way of rubricae under which fundamental rights are allocated.
Human Rights in the Soviet Union
FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS IN THE SOVIET UNION: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH
Revelations from the Russian Archives
Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era
Прав тот, у кого больше прав .
Right is he who has more rights.
Russian saying
“The problem with Soviet legal history,” Martin Malia once quipped, “is that there’s not enough of it.” The remark was meant to register the pervasiveness, among elites and masses alike, of extra-legal ways of doings things, the apparent irrelevance of Soviet law to Soviet practices, and the particular Bolshevik contempt (sanctioned by Marx, Lenin, and others) for the “bourgeois” notion of the rule of law . Soviet law, in this widely shared view, functioned primarily as a façade for domestic and foreign spectators, behind which the real mechanisms of power operated. Implicit in this approach is an assumption of bad faith: those laws, or at least some laws, were not meant to be actionable and instead served a purely ideological function. It is a critique whose pedigree reaches back at least to Max Weber’s attack on the “pseudoconstitutionalism” of tsarist Russia following the revolution of 1905.