Activating Human and Fundamental Rights Before the European Courts

This open access book adds a new dimension to the long-standing research on the co-existence of European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU, and their inter-related action and explicit interaction.

As the two Courts are increasingly called upon to interpret corresponding rights, particularly owing to the ever-growing importance of fundamental rights in the EU legal order, the stakes intensify. Prior studies have mostly focused on the constitutional and substantive issues connected to this interaction. This book focuses on another dimension: the lesser-told yet fascinating tale of two – increasingly substantively overlapping – European-level judicial systems with their own procedures and institutional idiosyncrasies, their own terminology, and with their own epistemic communities of practitioners and scholars, and their own relationship to national law.

In this collection a team of experts – academics and practitioners - from both systems bridges the gap between these two worlds of fundamental and human rights protection, investigating their commonalities and differences. They address the questions 'who can go where?', 'on what procedural roads?', 'at what speed?' and 'to what final destination?'.

This book is an essential resource for anyone working or studying the protection of fundamental and human rights in Europe.