Title PhD
Specters of competence creep: the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the constitutional balance in the EU
Research fields/disciplines
EU constitutional law - Fundamental rights law
Abstract
Fundamental rights have always held a peculiar place in the EU legal order. Absent in the early Treaties of the 1950s, they were only implicitly protected by the Court of Justice (ECJ) as general principles of law in the following decades. That changed in 2009, when the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights was granted primary law status and became legally binding. During the Charter’s drafting process, however, some Member States feared that the ECJ would use the Charter to break into the realm of national competence. To prevent such ‘competence creep’, they inserted certain ‘containment clauses’, limiting the application of EU fundamental rights to national measures. This research examines whether and how these clauses have limited the Charter’s scope of application. Have the Member States successfully curbed competence creep? Or, conversely, have their efforts been in vain?