Institutional Aspects of EU's accession to the European Convention on Human Rights

With the Lisbon Treaty in place, the EU has the legal basis to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The aim of the accession is to strengthen the protection of human rights in Europe, and give European citizens the same protection vis-à-vis acts of the Union as they presently enjoy from member states. EU’s accession to the ECHR is welcomed, but as great as it is in theory as complicated it is in terms of institutional structure and division of competences between two legal regimes. It is crucial at this stage of the accession to define the Luxembourg and Strasbourg courts respective roles so that they can function individually and together in order to optimize European human rights protection. Using Weber’s notion of concept formation this thesis establishes that values of hierarchy, competition and negotiation permeate the ongoing negotiation about how to design the institutional structure of the accession. These findings are supplemented with a normative discussion in which some elements of the institutional structures that are present in the debate are embraced and combined so as to make up an institutional set-up that would optimize human rights protection in Europe