Of Tangled and Truthful Hierarchies: EU Accession to the ECHR and Its Possible Impact on the UK’s Relationship with European Human Rights

Abstract

Having been first envisaged and discussed as early as 1979 in a European Commission Memorandum, the European Union’s (EU)2 accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) seemed to be a never-ending story. In fact, accession appeared to be legally impossible after major setbacks such as Opinion 2/94 in which the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) held that, as Union law stood back then, the EU had no competence to accede to the Convention...