The Evolution of EU Human Rights Law
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Description
The subject of the European Union’s human rights law and policy was not included in the first edition of this book in 1999. Although there was a constitutionally significant line of case law of the European Court of Justice on the subject, human rights issues did not feature prominently in EU law at the time, and despite scattered human rights activity across the field of external relations and in the area of gender discrimination, the EU did not, to quote the views of leading commentators in 1998, have a human rights policy. Just over ten years later, the picture is a very different one, and the absence of a chapter on human rights would be a notable omission from a book on the evolution of EU law. There is now an emergent EU constitutional regime for human rights protection, and there is a rich scholarly literature on EU human rights law. This chapter does not attempt to provide an overview of developments in this field or to summarize the analyses contained in the extensive literature. Instead, it aims to add a new dimension to existing understandings of the evolution of human rights law and policy in the EU by returning to reconsider some of the earliest steps of engagement with the issue of human rights protection in the process of European integration, drawing on largely unknown archival material from the early 1950s. To that end the chapter focuses closely on the brief but intense period in 1951 – 52 when the question of human rights protection was prominent on the agenda of those promoting the process of integration, before its abrupt disappearance from the agenda of the new European Communities in 1957. Two significant drafting exercises took place during this time. The first resulted in the draft articles produced by the Comité d’études sur une constitution européene (CECE) in 1952, and the second the relevant provisions of the draft Treaty on a European Political Community (EPC) in 1952 – 53. Little or no attention has been given in the EU legal literature on human rights so far to these early attempts to define a role for the emerging European entity in the field of human rights protection. The reason for this neglect is at one level evident and understandable, since neither attempt ultimately bore fruit. As is well known by students of EU law, the failure of the European Defence Treaty in the early 1950s led to a significant scaling back of ambitions for European integration and for the very idea of a European political community. One of the consequences of this scaling back was that, following the European Coal and Steel Community Treaty, neither the Euratom Treaty nor the EEC Treaty of 1957 made any mention of a role for the EU in relation to human rights, and the earlier drafting attempts of the 1950s were consigned to history.
Source Publication
The Evolution of EU Law
Source Editors/Authors
Paul Craig, Gráinne de Búrca
Publication Date
2011
Edition
2
Recommended Citation
de Búrca, Gráinne, "The Evolution of EU Human Rights Law" (2011). Faculty Chapters. 2081.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/2081
