The significance of the European convention on human rights in European Community law

Abstract

The Court has been seen as increasing its judicial activism in this field. Another view is that the Court's vision of human rights may be too "market orientated" preferring the furthering of its integrationalist and federalist aims rather than protecting values which are genuinely fundamental to the human condition. The Court may also be seen as engineering the intrusion of Community law into the sphere of the European Court of Human Rights however it is ill-equipped to do this since it has no codified charter of rights on which to exercise its jurisdiction. The judgements of the European Court of Justice often conflict with those of the European Court of Human Rights. This is often caused by the Court of Justice's extension of the Community's competence to require national laws to comply with human rights and with general principles of law thus creating the possibility of overlap and conflict between the pronouncements of the two courts. Another factor is that both Courts pursue different purposes; in that while the Community's objectives are the economic and social integration, the European Convention's objective is the protection of the individual as a human being. Since the Community is not at present a member of the Council of Europe, nor a signatory to the European Convention, the European model of protection of fundamental rights therefore, rests on the existence of two distinct supranational legal orders, namely, the European Convention of Human Rights legal order and the Community legal order.