Over the past half century, the European Parliament has undergone a remarkable transformation from an assembly endowed with supervisory powers to a directly-elected legislator, co-deciding most secondary legislation on equal footing with the Council. Furthermore, while human rights were not...

‘Rights to solidarity’ is a rather new expression, recently minted in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In this chapter, the term will be used to refer to social and economic rights ; the basic question that will be posed is what the Charter has to say about the...

After consecutive treaty amendments during the 1990s, the EU looks set for a conclusive revision through the process embodied by the Convention. Is the EU approaching what Joscka Fischer has coined the finality of European integration? This paper discusses the prelimininary results as well as...

Establishment of the EEA with a court for the EFTA Countries ten years ago gives an opportunity to examine more facets of interrelations between courts and legal orders of different jurisdictions. The EEA differs from the Community legal order in that it is constructed as an agreement under...

After the Baltic states had become candidate members to EU and NATO these organizations exercised considerable efforts to bring the political institutions of these countries and their elites’ orientations into correspondence with international liberal democratic standards of including...

In democratic societies, legal procedures are to ensure legally correct and rationally acceptable decisions, i.e. decisions that can be defended both in relation to legal statutes and in relation to public criticism. But can the legal system via the discretion of the judges itself really...

This paper aims at exploring the impact that the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, solemnly proclaimed in December 2000, might have on the relationships of the Union with applicant countries and with third states. Although not formally legally binding, it is argued that the...

Europeans currently reflect on how to express and promote human rights and solidarity in their common institutions in the new Constitutional Treaty now facing ratification. What is the scope of toleration towards states that violate human rights, within and beyond its borders? And what is the...

This article argues that a key to the influence of the EU in foreign policy is its consistent basis for the latter in terms of the legitmacy of human rights in current international affairs. Humanrights norms today carry both normative power in a public discourse on foreign policy, and they are...