A couple of weeks ago, between June 19 and 22, the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee for Human Rights (french acronym: CDDH) held its 75^th meeting. Two topics of particular interest for the MultiRights project were key points on the agenda: the follow-up of the Brighton declaration, and the European Union’s accession to the ECHR. As the title already suggests, this blog post will deal with only the fact that negotiations on the latter has in fact restarted. Read more »

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As noted by Antoine Buyse over at the ECHR blog, the parliamentarians of Europe recently welcomed the decision by the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers¹ to resume the negotiations on the European Union’s accession to the ECHR. The most interesting parts of the press release from the joint informal body² of members of the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) reads as follows:³

“A joint informal body of members of the European Parliament and Council of Europe parliamentarians has welcomed the prospect of talks resuming on EU accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

[…]

The two co-chairs of the Joint Informal Body, Pietro Marcenaro and Carlo Casini, said it was “of the utmost importance” that these negotiations reach a speedy conclusion and that the momentum towards an agreement is not lost.

‘EU accession to the ECHR is crucial with a view to securing a common space for human rights protection across the European continent,’ they said. ‘It is thus essential that the modalities of such accession are completed at a political level as rapidly as possible, and that all outstanding questions are settled.’”

As mentioned in an earlier post on this blog, where an overview of the negotiation process was given, the EU's internal negotiations on the draft Agreement on the Accession of the European Union to the ECHR have been concluded. Thus, it was assumed that the negotiations would continue in a forum that would also include the non-EU member states. Exactly how and when was nevertheless unclear.

This issue was put on the agenda of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe's meeting 13 June 2012.[1] After today’s release of the decisions adopted during that meeting, it is now clear how the parties to the negotiations intend to go forward: Read more »

Since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, the European Union has been obliged to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).¹ As a result of this obligation, negotiations with a view to drawing up an accession agreement between the Union, on the one hand, and the state parties to the ECHR, on the other, have been underway for more than a year.²

The Union's accession to the ECHR is of particular interest to the MultiRights project, because it aims to streamline Europe's multi-leveled system of human rights protection by creating formal links between the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). In this blog post I will briefly explain the complex negotiation process, and outline the next likely steps. Read more »

The Plenary Court adopted on 20 February 2012 a preliminary opinon in preparation for the Brighton Conference.

In this document the Court proposes new steps that should be taken in the future with respect to the four different categories of cases, according to the Court's prioritisation policy: Inadmissible cases; Repetitive cases; Non repetitive, non-priority cases; and Priority cases. Read more »