A three-layered system of fundamental rights

Daniel Thym

Chapter 11 in Research Handbook on European Constitutional Law, 2026, pp 193-212 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: What started as a codification exercise to make human rights ‘visible’ has resulted in increasingly dynamic judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) interpreting the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Its introduction by the Treaty of Nice responded to decades of political initiatives and gentle pressure from national constitutional courts, notably in Italy and Germany. While the undertaking has been flourishing in legal terms, the political ambition of fostering a sense of belonging among the citizenry by means of a written catalogue of fundamental rights remains to be fully achieved. It is inherent in the multilevel characteristics of the European legal sphere that CJEU judgments on the Charter interact—and occasionally compete—with rulings of national constitutional courts and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). After decades of tensions, these courts seem to have reached a modus vivendi based on cross-fertilisation and the recognition of differences.

Keywords: Human rights; ECHR; EU; Charter of Fundamental Rights; CJEU; Constitution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781802207866
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781802207873.00022 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21304_12

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().