Tobias Lock, Professor of Law in the School of Law and Criminology and Director of the Maynooth Centre for European Law, who researches in the area of European Law, recently published an article in the ECHR Law Review entitled “Implications of the Revised Draft EU Accession Agreement for the ECHR”.
The article explores the implications of the EU’s accession to the ECHR from the ECHR perspective based on the revised Draft Accession Agreement (DAA 2023). The article analyses key procedural innovations in the DAA 2023, notably how the co-respondent mechanism, the prior involvement of the Court of Justice of the EU, and the DAA’s solutions for advisory opinion requests and for dealing with the EU law concept of mutual trust would work. It exposes the EU’s new role as a gatekeeper in relation to certain procedural questions. The article further contrasts the position of EU member states and non-EU member states post-accession by pointing out potential inconsistencies and assesses proposed solutions in light of their effectiveness and workability. The article suggests that, despite the considerable concessions made to the EU, EU accession to the ECHR would nonetheless result in a strengthening of the ECHR system and is thus worth the effort and compromises.
Read the article in full here.