The European Union Protection of Human Rights

Abstract

The problem of fundamental rights in European construction should be situated in this particular historical and political context. As long as the European project progressed with strictly economic objectives, there were no references whatsoever to the subject of fundamental rights in the Constitutive Treaties of the European Communities. Although human rights protection had assumed an essential dimension in the European legal order in the period after the Second World War, in the different European States and the international level of Constitutional law in the different European States and at international level via approval of the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950, the specific nature of the community integration process meant that it had not been the object of the precepts on fundamental rights. The lack of a catalogue of human rights in the constitutive legal acts of the European communities and the total absence of the Treaty provisions on the supervision of those rights in the context of the application of Community law begged the question of knowing just what protection citizens would have before Community normative acts that potentially infringed on their rights, and before actions taken by Community institutions that offended the fundamental rights of persons.