This article offers a perspective on how the objective of a strong and coherent European protection standard pursued by the fundamental rights amendments of the Lisbon Treaty can be achieved, as it proposes a discursive pluralistic framework to understand and guide the relationship between the EU Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. It is argued that this framework – which is suggested as an alternative to the EU law approach to the Strasbourg system applied by the CJEU in Opinion 2/13 and its Charter-based case law – has a firm doctrinal, case law and normative basis. The article ends by addressing three of the most pertinent challenges to European fundamental rights protection through the prism of the proposed framework.