EU can't sign up to key rights convention, court rules
Photo © James Steidl - Fotolia
(LUXEMBOURG) - The EU's top court ruled on Thursday that the bloc cannot join the bedrock European Convention on Human Rights as planned because to do so would undermine its own laws.
The ECHR is a key legal instrument, entirely separate from the EU, which allows any citizen from its 47 member countries to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if they believe their home jurisdiction has failed them.
The European Union's 28 states are all signatories to the convention, but the EU itself is not.
However, the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, which established the EU in its current form, set accession as a goal and the bloc's leaders gave the green light in 2013.
As a first step, the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, approached the European Court of Justice to seek its opinion on whether ECHR accession was compatible with EU law.
"Accession is liable to upset the underlying balance of the EU and undermine the autonomy of EU law," the court said in its ruling.
The European Commission said it would "take note of the ruling" and examine it in depth, but recalled that it remained an obligation under the EU's treaties to seek membership of the convention.
The European Convention on Human Rights was drafted in 1950 by the Council of Europe, a pan-European body set up after World War II to promote rights across the continent, which is also separate from the EU.
In a complex argument, the ECJ found several serious problems with the EU joining the convention, especially in the confusion it could create between the EU as an institution, and the rights and duties of its member states.
In practice, if the European Union joined the ECHR alongside its member states all of them would be required to fulfil a basic obligation -- to check on each other to ensure that all were observing fundamental rights.
That would effectively mean they could take legal action against each other, above and beyond the EU.
But EU law, which governs relations between the 28, "imposes an obligation of mutual trust between member states," the ECJ said.
"In light of the problems identified, the Court concludes that the draft agreement on the accession of the EU to the ECHR is incompatible with EU law," it said.