The contribution explores the implications of disagreements about rights in the ‘multi-layered’ European polity for the autonomy of EU fundamental rights law. It argues that insomuch as the EU’s weak claim to supra-national political authority is corroborated by a strong case for economic integration, the internal market operates not simply as a constraining factor in the effective realisation of fundamental rights, but provides the very foundation of their autonomous interpretation in the EU legal order. Sections II and III elaborate upon the relationship between conflicts of authority in the European legal space and the autonomous interpretation of EU fundamental rights law under conditions of political disagreement. Section IV links the argument to the often-alleged instrumentalisation of EU fundamental rights in the service of the market. Sections V and VI substantiate the guiding contention of the contribution—that the autonomy of EU fundamental rights law is rooted in the unity of the market—with an analysis of pertinent case law. The concluding section suggests that the transformation of the EU into a ‘genuine’ human rights polity must proceed through a politicisation of the market by virtue of fundamental rights law.

The proposal for a new General Data Protection Regulation has been billed as a harbinger of increased harmonisation, better enforcement and modernised rules within the area of data protection law. Through an analysis of several central elements in the draft Regulation—and European data protection law in general—as well as an assessment of the practical implications the proposal is likely to have if adopted, this chapter challenges whether the proposal will be able to deliver the harmonised rules that have been promised. It focuses particularly on the proposed regulations scope of application, its legal architecture, the use of discretionary provisions and related issues.

It is argued that the proposal not only fails to address the root causes of why the current data protection directive (Directive 95/46) failed to bring about harmonisation and effective rules, but also looks set to transplant them into the new regulation.

The EU case law, embodied by the Racke judgment, constituted a normative compromise between the judicial treatment of international customary law and that of international treaties. Indeed, the lack of precision of an international customary norm would not prevent it from being assessed by the EU Courts on the merits of the case, albeit to a lesser degree of judicial review. The lack of precision of an international treaty provision would in contrast make it unenforceable on the facts of the case (subject to two exceptions and the doctrine of consistent interpretation), whereas when sufficiently precise, the treaty provision would be assessed in full by the EU Courts. In Air Transport Association of America, the Court of Justice projected onto the challenged EU secondary act a hybrid and alternative direct effect analysis, borrowed in part from the classical approach to direct effect and in part from the first branch of the direct concern standing requirement whilst also adopting an absolute manifest violation test due to an imprecision bias targeted at all international customary norms. The Court of Justice thereby disrupted this normative compromise: any international customary norm, provided that it or the challenged EU secondary act passes the hybrid direct effect test, would also trigger a marginal form of judicial review in validity review actions before the EU Courts, regardless of its nature and inherent qualities. This chapter aims to argue that the direct effect requirements, which emerge from the case law on the import of international treaties into the EU legal order, remain adequate to assess the judicial enforceability of ordinary international customary law in the EU legal system minus the requirement revolving around the broad logic and nature of the international customary norm. International customary norms should, accordingly, be assessed on the basis of the same direct effect criteria as those applicable to the Constitutive Treaties and EU secondary acts when assessing their relation to Member States’ national legal orders. However, the precision and unconditionality criteria ought to be appreciated with more flexibility with regard to the import of international customary norms in order to account for their unique normative character. The ‘express reference’ ‘implementation’ exceptions specific to the international treaty judicial context may also be transposed to the assessment of international customary law in validity review actions. The application of the doctrine of consistent interpretation to international customary norms and their use as interpretative tools before the EU Courts constitute judicial implications of the principle of primacy of international customary law binding upon the Union over inconsistent EU secondary acts.

This chapter aims to explore some challenges that are likely to arise in the context of the UK’s present and future relationships with the EU. Three aspects come under scrutiny, namely the global opt-out available for the UK in the field of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters (Protocol 36 to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU)), the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the contemplated 2017 referendum on whether the UK should remain an EU Member State. The chapter stresses not only the importance of restoring objectivity in the debates surrounding these issues, but also the necessity of taking due account of the uncertainties that these processes unavoidably entail as to their end results for both the UK and Scotland.

At least three generations of governance methods have been—and are still being—used for the regulation of the internal market: the classic EU method, leading to harmonisation and (more rarely) unification; the ‘new approach’ based on mutual recognition and the use of standards; and ‘new governance’ which does not entail any formal delegation of powers to the EU and operates through self-regulation, the creation of EU agencies and networks, administrative cooperation and other means of open coordination. It is impossible to establish either a hierarchy or a clear chronological order between these methods, while it is also quite difficult to reach a clear conclusion as to their efficiency. What is certain is that all methods of governance are under constant adjustment and that they all feed into one another in order to secure the smooth operation of the internal market. The interaction between these methods is the topic of the present chapter.

The principle of consistency has a prominent place in EU law. In the Treaty of Lisbon, it constitutes an umbrella under which a number of legal principles of EU law follow as corollaries. Consistency manifests itself within both horizontal and vertical levels of governance. This chapter will unpack this principle and will focus on the broader implications of consistency for the division of powers in EU law. In doing so, the authors aim to discuss the rise of consistency in EU law and decrypt its various constitutional expressions in order to determine its scope of application. Two notions of consistency are presented: a formal one that appears in the Treaty of Lisbon and a strategic one, prominent in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It is argued that consistency is relevant to both traditional (integrationist) and alternative (differentiated) routes to European integration. The chapter concludes by discussing whether the undefined nature of ‘consistency’ puts it at risk of becoming an empty vessel.

This article examines the relationship between the EU and the Council of Europe’s Social Charter. It considers the differing approaches to the protection of economic and social rights and the relationship between the two legal orders. It further examines whether the EU should consider acceding to the European Social Charter so as to ensure the effective protection of economic and social rights.

This chapter suggests the deployment of the concept of European citizenship as a means of integration alongside the internal market, proposing the citizenship paradigm of European integration to inform the Union’s future. This proposal, based on a combination of the initial promise of European unity and the potential of EU citizenship, is not purely utopian but is directly rooted in the primary law as well as in the purpose of the integration project.

Even though the decision to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) is a fait accompli, the terms under which the accession should take place are still very much open to debate. The present chapter focuses specifically on the possible tensions which may arise in the aftermath of the EU’s accession to the ECHR in four of the core elements of the EU area of freedom, security and justice (AFSJ): recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters, wrongful removal or retention of a child, the Common European Asylum System and the European Arrest Warrant. It then puts forward a number of solutions which could be included either in the accession agreement itself or in the post-accession case law of the ECtHR and which allow not only for the preservation of the coherence and integrity of the AFSJ but also for external judicial control on human rights matters in the AFSJ.

By focusing on processes and institutional change, EU citizenship emerges as a co-created institution. It is the product of institutional design and co-creation by actors at all levels of governance and is shaped by multilogues at the ‘top’, ‘bottom’ and ‘sideways’, as well as by citizens’ formal and informal actions. A co-creation perspective leads us to reconsider state-centred assumptions about which form of citizenship should be predominant and the dualism of centralism (supra-nationalism) versus ‘home-rule’ (intergovernmentalism), and to embrace a genuinely citizen-centred perspective. The chapter develops the co-creation paradigm, examines its dimensions, various forms and patterns and, by discussing the post-Rottmann and Zambrano case law (McCarthy, Dereci, Iida, O, S and L and Ymeraga) as well as Tsakouridis and PI, sheds light onto the complex dynamics that make EU citizenship a vehicle of transformative institutional change but that can also work against it.

This chapter briefly describes how neoliberalism achieved its current position as the dominating (if contested) ideology of the developed world and explains core neoliberal values and policy prescriptions, as well as the effect that they have had on public procurement. It explores the ideological importance of public procurement regulation from the neoliberal perspective and the features that neoliberal principles might suggest should be built into any international regime of public procurement regulation. It then describes the regulation of public procurement by the EU, which it argues maps closely onto the predicted neoliberal construct. It explains that, although the EU regime operates by extensively curtailing the purchasing discretion of public bodies in the Member States, neoliberal arguments have been advanced, and are currently being advanced, to curtail that discretion further. It analyses the extent to which such arguments have failed before the Court of Justice of the European Union to date and then explains the far-reaching additional arguments that are currently being advanced to neoliberalise the EU public procurement regime. These argue for the application of ‘competition’ (the ‘efficiency’ concept of competition) and the pursuit of ‘value for money’ as dominating norms for the system. This chapter then explains how the adoption of such norms would curtail the ability of public purchasers to pursue horizontal policies (the use of public procurement to achieve collateral policy goals such as environmental or social policy goals). It argues, however, that the suggested efficiency/value for money norms are not legally justified. This is because the concept of ‘competition’ to which EU public procurement regulation refers is not the neoliberal ‘efficiency’ concept, but a concept based upon economic freedom that is concerned with competitive equality and the structure of competition in public contracts markets. It is also because the present author accepts the argument that has been advanced by Sue Arrowsmith that, although the pursuit of ‘value for money’ is the central goal of the domestic regulation of public procurement, the legal bases on which EU public procurement legislation is founded do not permit it to mandate the pursuit of ‘value for money’ as a matter of European obligation. The chapter argues, in any event, that in the public procurement context, ‘value for money’ is a complex, multi-faceted and value-driven concept that does not equate to neoliberal notions of ‘efficiency’. Finally, it identifies an internal tension between two aspects of the neoliberal prescription in the public procurement context, the desire to constrain public purchaser discretion so as to preclude, in particular, the pursuit of horizontal policies on the one hand, and the preference to use ‘market-based’ instruments of policy rather than regulation on the other. It explains how a further neoliberal preoccupation, the constant need to improve international ‘competitiveness’, has provoked the EU to adopt (as part of its core economic strategy) the pursuit of horizontal policies in public procurement, both on a voluntary basis and as mandated by EU sectoral legislation. It concludes that by so doing, the EU has rejected a central tenet of neoliberal ideology as regards public procurement (hostility to the so-called ‘instrumental’ use of public procurement to implement horizontal policies) and that its direction of travel means that the neoliberal argument that public procurement must be regulated predominantly to achieve ‘efficiency’ has implicitly been discarded.

This chapter explores the ambiguous allocation of authority in the governance of two areas of environmental protection: industrial pollution and genetically modified organisms. Ambiguity, that is, a difficulty in asserting that any single actor has the final word on a subject, is inevitable in the EU’s multi-level governance system and is not necessarily undesirable. These two examples demonstrate that even in the face of concerted efforts to introduce a formal hierarchy, the need for collaboration around softer norms persists.

This chapter examines the relationship between the methods that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) use to decide disputes that involve ‘human’ or ‘fundamental’ rights claims, and the substantive outcomes that result from the use of these particular methods. It has a limited aim: in attempting to understand the interrelationship between human rights methodology and human rights outcomes, it considers primarily the use of ‘comparative reasoning’ in ‘human’ and ‘fundamental’ rights claims by these courts. It is not primarily concerned with examining the extent to which the use of comparative reasoning is based on an appropriate methodology or whether there is a persuasive normative theory underpinning the use of comparative reasoning. The issues considered in this chapter do some of the groundwork, however, that is necessary in order to address these methodological and normative questions.

This contribution analyses the viability of the new Spanish financial landscape which has been drawn by the European authorities and the national administration in order to overcome the progressive deterioration of social wealth in Spain since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008.

The adoption and the implementation of a new legal framework during the last two years, establishing tougher requirements on capital adequacy, leverage ratios and counter-cyclical and other buffers, as well as the shaping of the Banking Union, are not enough to transform the Spanish banking system into the key tool for the creation of wealth.

There is a paradox of both legal and institutional outcomes. While, on the one hand, some positive changes in the functioning and the structure of the banking industry have been prompted by the regulatory reform, there are, on the other hand, some uncertainties linked to the recapitalisation costs of a relevant group of credit institutions and the persistence of serious structural problems of the Spanish economy.

Moving faster to full banking union will reduce financial market stress in Spain.

The proportionality principle plays a key role in constitutional review of public acts. Its use legitimises the constitutional claims of EU law in the context of a multi-level polity system. The application of proportionality in the EU differs based on whether legal acts of the EU or of its Member States are concerned. In the former case, a manifestly disproportionate test is usually applied, while in the latter case, a least restrictive means test (LRM) is normally used. Both are conditioned by the degree of integration achieved. In future, the use of the principle may involve increasing attention being paid to individual rights.