Abstract: On June 30, 2009, the German Constitutional Court declared the Lisbon Treaty to be compatible with the German constitution. The Lisbon decision marked the end of an intense constitutional battle. The following text illustrates how different views on and different understandings of...

The place and legal value of social rights in the EU Charter is only one episode (albeit a long drawn out episode, lasting since 2000)in the ongoing struggle about the ‘fundamentalisation’ of social rights, which is the subject of the contributions to this collective Working Paper. In the...

The use of one and the same word, i.e. Justice in the English or French language to render the two concepts of Gerechtigkeit when the issue is about equitability or fairness in social relations, and of Justiz when the issue is about the administration of justice often leads lawyers to overlook...

This paper examines the main questions raised by the accession of the European Union to the Revised European Social Charter, under the new architecture of the Union provided by the Treaty establishing a European Constitution. The paper is divided in five parts. The historical background is...

The paper examines deals with the possibility to keep the acquis of the Constitutional Treaty in terms of simplification of the EC-EU treaties and of rationalisation of the EU legal system if the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe were not to be ratified in the form it has been signed...

Particular problems in EU human rights protection stem from the final clauses of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Articles 51 ff). This paper examines these key provisions as well as the proposals for amendments which have been put forward by Working Group II of the Convention and which...