Three ‘Bills of Rights’ for the European Union

Summary:

This article investigates the Union's three bills of European human rights and the constitutional relations between them.

The article starts with the discovery of an ‘unwritten’ bill of rights in the form of general principles of European law. The following section analyses the Union's own ‘written’ bill of rights in the form of its Charter of Fundamental Rights. The last section investigates the relationship between the Union and the ‘external’ bill of rights in the form of the European Convention on Human Rights. While the co-existence of an external and internal human rights bill is hardly unusual, the presence of two internal human rights regimes is a special feature of the Union legal order.

The article questions if the ambivalent relationship of the latter with the European Convention's external standard has been ‘internalized’ by Article 6(3) Treaty on the European Union (TEU).

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