20 years after its adoption, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights remains largely unknown to Europeans, partially applied and yet all the more indispensable, as the last 10 years have seen the emergence of “new challenges, for instance in the areas of migration and security, and most recently, in the context of the Covid-19 crisis that brought about restrictions on a wide array of fundamental rights and freedoms and widened the inequality gap”.
On the basis of this observation, the European Commission presented, on Wednesday 2 December, its new strategy to strengthen the application of this Charter.
The strategy opens with a chapter devoted to the application by states of the text, whose " review of its performance in practice yields a mixed picture”, had alerted the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) in 2018.
The Commission first of all undertakes to “strengthen its partnership with Member States” to ensure “effective application” of the text.
Furthermore, it states that its annual report on the Charter will henceforth be made by focusing on its application in the Member States in specific areas. The 2021 report will focus, for example, on fundamental rights in the digital age.
Article 51
The strategy also calls on the Member States to appoint an ombudsman to help them implement Community law, as required by the Charter. It is “a legally binding instrument”, the Commission recalls, stressing that it applies, however, only when States implement Community law.
A few days before the publication of the strategy, Yana Toom MEP (Renew Europe, Estonia), in a plenary debate on fundamental rights (see EUROPE 12608/6), rightly regretted that MEPs’ repeated calls for the revision of this provision had never materialised.
“It is very sad that we, again and again, have to write to petitioners” by saying “Look, we understand your problem, we see that something is wrong, but we can’t do anything because of the Article 51 of the Charter”, lamented Mrs Toom, Vice-Chair of Parliament’s Committee on Petitions.
Raising Awareness
Secondly, with regard to the capacity of civil society, the Commission assures that it will act against national measures that infringe Community law and affect civil society organisations.
It further regrets that some States do not have fully operational national human rights institutions and reiterates its commitment to independent national judicial systems (see EUROPE 12599/30). The institution is committed to encouraging the training of judges, other justice actors and defenders of Charter rights.
Finally, the Commission plans to launch an information campaign on the Charter. 57% of respondents to the Eurobarometer survey conducted in 2019 on the subject had never heard of this text.
See the strategy: https://bit.ly/3lvNmXh (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)