Seminar - Human Rights in Europe

The seminar is intended to create understanding for human rights as an essential component of the European Union. From the very outset, the European integration process was more than a marketplace for goods and services. The overarching aim was to foster a climate of mutual solidarity among the European nations, as explicitly stated already in the Preamble to the Treaty Establishing of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. Obviously, working for peace in the relations between the member States constitutes at the same time a policy for the protection of the rights of the populations concerned. Only at a later stage were human rights as such formulated explicitly as guiding criteria for the policies of the European Communities and later the European Union.
Over the years, a complex framework of principles and procedures has evolved. In 2009, the European Union enacted its own set of human rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights. However, the Charter is not the only standard that provides orientation to the action of the European Union. The European Union is also committed to the European Convention on Human Rights, and additionally the general principles of the national constitutions of the member States have remained as sources requiring respect at EU level. It goes almost without saying that the parallelism of those three sets of legal rules regulating the same subject-matter gives rise to frictions from time to time. Although largely concordant, they may differ in their answers to specific issues.
Many of the traditional doctrines that have guided the European integration process for more than 60 years have may have to be reconsidered as a consequence of the Brexit. At the present time (January 2019), these consequences seem to be unfathomable.