OPINION 2/13 ON THE EU ACCESSION TO THE ECHR

On 18 December 2014 the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered Opinion 2/13 on the European Union’s accession to the European Convention on Human rights (ECHR). The Court ruled that the Draft Agreement on the Accession of the EU to the ECHR was incompatible with EU legal order. Opinion 2/13 is complex decision which finds the conflict with the Treaties on several main grounds: violation of the integrity and autonomy of the EU legal order; institutional innovations that were included in the Accession Agreement and are not compatible with EU legal order and the specific characteristics of EU law as regards judicial review in Common foreign and security policy (CFSP) matters was not respected. This paper is focused on two reasons for the incompatibility: Protocol No 16 to the ECHR and Common foreign and security policy issues and it will try to answer further question : if the EU would access the ECHR, will the human rights protection be potentially better. Finally, the paper will reach the conclusion about two analysed reasons of incompatibility and propose possible solutions if there are some