11. Human Rights in the EU

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter discusses EU human rights law, and the way in which the ECJ developed fundamental rights as part of the Community legal order. The analysis includes the drafting of the EU Charter of Rights, and its application in the post-Lisbon world in which it is legally binding on the EU and on Member States when they act in the scope of EU law. The EU has gradually integrated human rights concerns into a range of its policies. The EU actively promotes its ‘human rights and democratization’ policy in many countries around the world, and uses human rights clauses in its international trade and development policies. It has imposed a human rights-based ‘political conditionality’ on candidate Member States, and claims to integrate human rights concerns throughout its common foreign and security policy.

Reflections on the ECOWAS Community Court Protocol and the Constitutions of Member States

Only recently, the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States, which was hitherto opened only to Community States, was expanded to allow direct human rights violation claims by individuals. Though the court has since started to function, its impact is yet to be felt ‐ citizens of recalcitrant Community States still live in wanton violation of their rights in most of the States, where national courts are weak and effective remedies for rights violations largely nonexistent. This is consequent upon the failure of Community States to align their national laws with the new legal order represented by the Community Court; national laws and indeed national courts are still very hostile to the court and its judgements, thereby discouraging citizens from attending the court. This Article takes a look at the relevant provisions of the constitutions of Community States and advocates an urgent need for the cooperation to be forged between national legal systems and the community legal system through the amendment of hostile laws, as a prerequisite to the achievement of the virile community legal order.