Redressing Fundamental Rights Violations by the EU

The EU prides itself on having created a legal system that puts the individual at its centre. Individuals benefit from a broad range of fundamental rights that protect them against EU power. However, to vindicate their rights against the EU, they have to make use of a remedies system as old as the EU itself. Unsurprisingly, with EU power growing and evolving, it also is increasingly difficult to challenge. This book critically examines the EU’s remedies system from a fundamental rights perspective, focusing on the EU’s activities outside the realm of lawmaking. It maps the existing mechanisms private parties can avail themselves of to enforce their fundamental rights against the EU and discovers their unused potential. In doing so, it offers an important synthesis of the state of play and directions for reform in areas where the EU falls short of its promise to provide a ‘complete system of remedies’. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Melanie Fink is Assistant Professor of European Law at Leiden University and APART-GSK Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Central European University. She researches and publishes in the areas of EU and public international law, with a focus on human rights and access to justice, the EU’s role in border control, and accountability in the context of administrative cooperation, including through the use of artificial intelligence systems.