Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-05-Speech-3-498"
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"en.20100505.75.3-498"2
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"Mr President, first of all let me thank both our rapporteurs – Kinga Gál and Ramón Jáuregui Atondo – and also the Commission and the Presidency.
Thank you very much for the very hard but necessary work that you have done.
When we were talking about the EU’s accession to the European Convention on Human Rights – and we have been talking about it in the European Union for the past 10 years, I think – there were quite a lot of worries that there would be competition between the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice, that we would have problems when it came to jurisdiction, that the autonomy of the European Court of Justice might be questioned.
But I think that what we have achieved in our work is that we are coming to a situation in which those two courts can be complementary. We were trying to do everything to avoid hierarchical thinking, but actually we have cross-fertilisation between those two systems of human rights protection. In the light of recent trends, where the ECJ follows the case-law of the Strasbourg court and vice versa, I think that the two systems coexist and actually there is no competition, and most of those fears have been dissipated.
In the recent
judgment that we all know very well, the European Court of Human Rights said that there was no need to re-examine the case because the EU, as such, offers an adequate level of protection of human rights. So then the question arises: why do we need accession to the Convention? This question has been posed by our colleagues here and, yes, we do need it. Why do we need it? Not only because of the symbolic meaning, which is important, but because the whole system of protecting human rights in the European Union will gain credibility in the eyes of citizens who will enjoy the protection from the actions of the EU, not only of the Member States as is the case now. When there is no effective judicial review either at national or at Community level – when, for example, the applicant is denied standing or the EU body concerned cannot be sued, those are the situations where we will have added value.
We are acceding to the Convention for the sake of greater coherence of the system of human rights protection, not to undermine the credibility of that system. We need loyalty, and that is why we postulate that inter-State applications should not be brought concerning an alleged failure of compliance when the act falls within the scope of Union law. We postulate this and we should do our utmost to put it into law.
Finally, I would like to thank very much the Commission for setting up a DG on Human Rights. I remember as a student reading Joseph Weiler’s articles about the protection of human rights. He came to the conclusion that you can do whatever you like in terms of applying for and acceding to the Convention on Human Rights, but if there is no implementation and follow-up in the Commission then it will be fruitless.
So finally, thanks to you, we have it. Hopefully we will go forward and have better protection of human rights in the European Union than we have now."@en1
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"Bosphorus"1
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