Skip to main content
School of Law

The Accession of the European Union to the European Convention on Human Rights

28 November 2013

Time: 4:00pm
Venue: The Octagon, Queens Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road E1 4NS

Hosted by Dr Paul Gragl and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context, The School of Law, Queen Mary University of London and supported by Hart Publishing.

The Theme

After more than 30 years of discussion, negotiations between the Council of Europe and the European Union on the EU’s accession to the European Convention on Human Rights have resulted in a Draft Accession Agreement. This will allow the EU to accede to the Convention within the next couple of years. As a consequence, the Union will become subject to the external judicial supervision of an international treaty regime. Individuals will also be entitled to submit applications against the Union, alleging that their fundamental rights have been violated by legal acts rooted in EU law, directly to the Strasbourg Court.

As the first comprehensive monograph on this topic, this book examines the concerns for the EU’s legal system in relation to accession and the question of whether and how accession and the system of human rights protection under the Convention can be effectively reconciled with the autonomy of EU law. It also takes into account how this objective can be attained without jeopardising the current system of individual human rights protection under the Convention.

The analysis presented in this book comes at a crucial point in the history of European human rights law, offering a holistic and detailed enquiry into the EU’s accession to the ECHR and how this move can be reconciled with the autonomy of EU law.

Review

[...] [T]he author deserves congratulations for his book not only because of its timeliness but also because of its rigorous analysis of all the critical legal issues associated with the EU’s accession to the ECHR. The book will prove to be most valuable for everyone trying to understand the background to the accession agreement [...]. 
Tobias Lock, Review in Yearbook of European Law 2013.

Introduction

Presentation

Discussion

This event will be followed by a drinks reception to which all attendees are invited.

Dr Paul Gragl joined Queen Mary in September 2013. Prior to arriving at Queen Mary, he was a Teaching and Research Fellow at the Institute of International Law and International Relations of the University of Graz, Austria (2010-2012), where he also completed his doctoral thesis on EU accession to the European Convention on Human Rights. From 2012 to 2013, he held the post of Research Fellow at City University London.

The organisers would like to thank Hart Publishing for their support of this event.

How to Book

This event is free but registration is required. To register for this event, please refer to the Eventbrite page.

Back to top