12. Human Rights in the EU

Abstract

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing 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. The UK version contains a further section analysing the relevance of EU conceptions of fundamental rights in relation to the UK post-Brexit.