The European Union and the Council of Europe

Abstract

This chapter discusses two final supranational mixed civil law and common law jurisdictions, which are comparable in size, population, and GDP to the United States of America, to India, to the former British Empire, and to Brazil. These jurisdictions had two common law members prior to Brexit becoming a reality in 2020: the United Kingdom and Ireland. These two supranational jurisdictions are, of course, the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe. The origins and growth of the power of judicial review in the EU is a very complicated tale of federalism umpiring giving rise to judicial power. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) successfully asserted its power between 1963 and 1989 to hear individual rights claims, as it enlisted the member courts of the EU over that period of time in the project of enforcing EU law as being supreme over the later-in-time law of the EU nation-states. The ECJ persuaded the national courts of the EU’s member states that (1) EU law had a direct effect in the member nations, and (2) that EU law was supreme over the post-1958 laws enacted by the EU member nations. The chapter then explains the origins and growth in power of the Council of Europe’s European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). This enterprise began for rights from wrongs reasons and has grown in power for supranational umpiring reasons.