Closing Chapter: Piecing the Puzzle Together

Abstract

The EU’s relationship with international law as interpreted by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) has taken a sharp constitutional turn in Opinion 2/13 which emphasized the autonomy of the EU legal order. Opinion 2/131 is, thus far, the culmination of a trend which stresses the autonomy of the EU legal order not just from its Member States, but also from other international legal orders, in casu the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).2 The position taken by the CJEU has been compared to states’ invoking sovereignty, and considered as even more demanding than that.3 The ‘victims’ are the ECHR, or more precisely the accession process of the EU to the Convention, and international law more generally. The target, however, was neither of them, but the very component parts of the EU, its own Member States, the distrust of which runs like a thread through Opinion 2/13. It reflects the power struggle between the EU and its Member States which is heightened in the CJEU’s case law in the context of external relations.