EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION / Alla Tymofeyeva (ed.)

Council Regulation (EC) No. 168/2007. The seat of the FRA is Vienna. The FRA’s primary methods of operation are surveys, reports, and the provisioning of expert assistance to EU bodies, member states, EU candidate countries, potential candidate countries, and the raising of awareness concerning fundamental rights. The FRA is not mandated to intervene in individual cases but rather to investigate broad issues and trends. The FRA experts pursue the objectives of collecting and analysing law and data; providing independent, evidence-based advice on rights; supporting rights-compliant policy responses; and strengthening cooperation and ties between fundamental rights actors. The FRA expertise includes the following topics: 1) access to justice; 2) victims of crime; 3) the information society; 4) Roma integration; 5) rights of the child; 6) anti-discrimination; 7) immigration and integration of migrants and 8) racism, xenophobia and intolerance. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) was established in 1952 and is located in Luxembourg. Its main role is to ensure that EU law is interpreted and applied in the same way in every EU country and that EU institutions abide by EU law. The CJEU is divided into 2 courts: 1. Court of Justice – handles requests for preliminary rulings from national courts; actions for annulment and appeals. 2. General Court – rules on actions for annulment brought by individuals, companies and, in some cases, EU governments. In practice, this means that this court deals mainly with competition law, state aid, trade and agriculture. The CJEU provides rulings on cases brought before it. The most common types of cases are interpreting the law (preliminary rulings); enforcing the law (infringement proceedings); annulling EU legal acts (actions for annulment); ensuring that the EU takes action (actions for failure to act); and sanctioning EU institutions (actions for damages). On 18 December 2014, the CJEU delivered its famous ruling (Opinion 2/13) regarding the EU’s accession to the Convention. It concluded that the agreement on the accession is not compatible with Article 6 (2) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) or with Protocol (No 8) relating to Article 6 (2) TEU. The Court of Justice ruled that the draft agreement was incompatible with EU law for five main reasons: 1. In so far as the Convention gives the Contracting Parties the power to lay down higher standards of protection than those guaranteed by the ECHR, the ECHR should be coordinated with the EU Charter. Where the rights recognised by the EU Charter correspond to those guaranteed by the Convention, the power granted to Member States must be limited to that which is necessary to ensure that the level of protection provided for by the EU Charter. There is no provision in the draft agreement to ensure such coordination. 2. The approach adopted in the draft agreement, which is to treat the EU as a State and to give it a role identical in every respect to that of any other Contracting Party, specifically disregards the intrinsic nature of the EU. In particular, this approach does not take account of the fact that, as regards the matters covered by the transfer of powers to the EU, the Member States have accepted that their relations are governed by EU law to the exclusion of any other law. 3. Protocol No. 16 to the Convention, signed on 2 October 2013, permits the highest courts and tribunals of the Member States to request the Court to give advisory opinions on questions of principle relating to the interpretation or application of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Convention or the protocols thereto. Given that, in the event of accession, the Convention would form an integral part of EU law, the mechanism established by that protocol could affect the autonomy and effectiveness of the preliminary ruling procedure provided for by the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (FEU Treaty), notably where rights guaranteed by the EU Charter correspond to rights secured by the Convention.

EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION

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