EU’s human rights talks could take two years
Officials say meeting commitments to join the European Convention on Human Rights will be a long process.
It could take up to two years for the European Union to fulfil its commitments to join the European Convention on Human Rights, according to officials following the issue.
Legal experts, MEPs and judges will discuss what many expect to be protracted technical negotiations at a special European Parliament hearing on Thursday (18 March), which will feature Viviane Reding, the EU’s justice commissioner. She is expected to present a draft of the EU’s negotiating mandate to the European Commission tomorrow (17 March).
Spanish centre-left MEP Ramón Jáuregui Atondo, who is drafting the Parliament’s position on the issue, said he expects “a long procedure” due to the legal issues and national protocols the EU has to deal with to join the Convention.
“I expect six months of negotiations, followed by a ratification process of 12 months,” said Jáuregui Atondo. “The problem is that the EU is not a state, which complicates the issue.”
While all 27 EU member states are members of the Council of Europe, and signatories to its human rights convention, the EU as a body is not. The Lisbon treaty, however, commits the EU, which is now a legal entity in its own right, to join the convention as a way to bolster and protect citizens’ rights under EU law.
The move could complicate how the EU’s own Court of Justice in Luxembourg will work with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
By signing up to the convention, all EU laws, rules and regulations will be subject to the scrutiny of the Strasbourg court. This could result in a surge of new cases on issues ranging from the EU’s directive on working time to rights of EU citizens living in other member states.
Such a flood of cases would come at a bad time, because the court is already struggling with a backlog of other rights cases, notably from Turkey and Russia.
Thorbjørn Jagland, secretary-general of the Council of Europe, said last month that he expects EU member states to agree on a negotiating mandate by June, after which negotiations could start. One of the tricky questions the talks must cover is how much the EU will contribute to the Council of Europe’s budget as a signatory to the convention.
Another dilemma is how the EU will pick a judge to join the 47-member judicial panel at the human rights court: since the EU is not a member of the Council of Europe it has no elected representatives to sit in the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly, which elects judges to the court. Jáuregui Atondo’s draft report suggests the EU submit a list of three candidates to the Parliamentary Assembly, which would pick one of them on behalf of the EU. He also proposes that the Parliament send special representatives to take part in such an assembly vote.
Joining the convention would not nullify or alter the EU’s own Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is included in the Lisbon treaty.
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