A Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union: Two Steps Forwards and One Backwards in the European Integration Process (Tatiana Ushakova)

Раздел - "Международное право"The article reflects the author's personal interpretation of the Document's significance for the European Union. Briefly, two steps forwards lays an emphasis on the importance of the Charter as such, making the fundamental rightsmore visible to the Union's citizens, and one step backwards means its undetermined legal status. The study is divided into four sections: Objectives, Particularities, Content and Legal Status and Relation Between the Charter and Other Rules of Fundamental Rights. There are also an Introduction and Conclusions. In the first section three main Charter's objectives are stressed: the visibility of the fundamental rights, which is a principal one, the legal security that should be provided by such a catalogue and the necessity of firm grasp for both European Union member States and candidate States. The second section concerning the particularities analyzes the Body authorized to elaborate the text of the Charter and its methods of work. Then some features of structure and principles are mentioned. The structure of the Charter is organized in such a way that all the chapters include different categories of fundamental rights according to the most important legal values. This kind of the Charter organization is based upon the general principles of the human rights indivisibility and universality. Nevertheless, these principles do not posses the absolute character. Numerous exceptions emerge from the concrete rights concepts. Thus, the third section deals with some fundamental rights categories and their sources in the International Law, European Law and State practice. Special attention is paid to the economic and social rights and to the so-called "new" rights. Finally, the fourth section concerns the issues of application. Despite the Charter's explicit legal binding importance, the more considerable problem of application appeared from the relations between the Charter's provisions and other international rules about fundamental rights. Therefore, there are some contradictions and ambiguity in the Charter dispositions touching its concordance with the Rome Convention (ECHR) and the EU and EC Treaties. It is vital that the Charter becomes a part of the EU Treaty because of its coherence with the European Union Law. The EU independent system of the fundamental rights protection should be created