Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union
In the early 1990s the protection of Union’s fundamental rights at Community or EU level came to the fore. In addition to the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg in previous decades related to fundamental rights, it has become necessary to codify fundamental rights or, for the European Union, to join the European Convention on Human Rights. The latter step was not taken in the early 1990s, but has been back on the agenda since 2013 with ongoing legal and political debates surrounding the accession treaty.
However, the catalogue of fundamental rights that are prevailing and applicable in the field of EU law has been compiled. As a first step, in 2000 in the framework of a so-called Convention, the Member States of the Union drafted the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which was adopted in December 2000 by the three main organs of the Union, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission, in the form of a solemn declaration as a document without legally binding force. The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 coincided with the entry into force of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union on 1 December 2009 as an international treaty with legally binding force, which binds all EU institutions and Member States to respect the rights in the scope of application of EU law.
The Charter draws heavily on the earlier case law of the European Court of Justice on fundamental rights, legal principles drawn from the constitutional traditions of the Member States, and international conventions concluded by the Member States and the Union, in particular the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The principle of prohibition of discrimination on the basis of affiliation with a racial, ethnic or national minority is explicitly mentioned and Article 22 declares the promise of respecting cultural, religious and linguistic diversity on behalf of the European Union.