The Future of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

The Future of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

This paper considers the issue of the future status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and some of the related questions surrounding accession by the Community to the European Convention on Human Right. It first looks at how we got to where we are and why that affects the debates about the future of the Charter. The author then comments on what we have at the moment, in particular the status, role and content of the existing Charter. The paper also considers some of the options for the future of the Charter, before examining some of the deeper issues underlying the debates about these options.

The author concludes that the question of what to do with the Charter in the future is controversial because of disagreements on a considerable range of different issues. There is disagreement on:

• what the history of human rights protection in Europe teaches us;
• what the current Charter is and what it does;
• what giving legal force to the Charter would involve and what its implications would be;
• the place that a future Charter of Fundamental Rights should have in the future of European integration, and (indeed) what the future of European integration should be;
• the role of the Charter in the development of the European social model;
• the role that rights serve in democratic government;
• the nature of human rights, and the autonomy of the law that seeks to protect them;
• the benefits of ambiguity.

Professor McCrudden argues that an informed understanding of the specific options set out in the paper on how to treat the Charter of Fundamental Rights in the future requires an understanding of each of these sets of disagreements. He concludes that a complex, but vital, task awaits all those concerned with the future of Europe, not least the Convention established at Laeken.

Christopher McCruddenis Professor of Human Rights Law at Oxford University, and a Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford.

• Read the full analysis:The Future of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights(Jean Monnet Working Papers, No.10/01).

• For more analyses see the Jean Monnet Program’swebsite. This site is part of the Academy of European Law online, a joint partnership of the Jean Monnet Program at Harvard Law School, the Jean Monnet Center at NYU School of Law and the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute.