Even though the European Convention on Human Rights is being applied in EU law, inter alia on the basis of Article 6 § 2 TEU, the Strasbourg Court has no jurisdiction in respect of the European Community or the European Union as such, neither of them being a Contracting Party to the European Convention on Human Rights 2.As regards the Court’s jurisdiction in respect of the EU Member States, a distinction is to be made between the acts of the EU institutions and the acts by which Member States give effect to EU law in their own legal system. With regard to the former, i.e. on the responsibility of the Member States – either individually or collectively – for acts of EU institutions, no answer has been provided yet by the Strasbourg Court and the question is likely to remain unanswered for a long while still, following the inadmissibility decision in the case of Senator Lines’.On the responsibility of the Member States for their own implementation of EU law, however, the case-law is gradually expanding into covering an ever greater number of pieces of the puzzle. As regards the mere “reception” of EU primary law by the domestic legal system of the Member States, reference should be made to the Matthews judgment in which the Strasbourg Court held the United Kingdom responsible for a breach of Article 3 of Protocol no. 1 to the Convention on account of the fact that by virtue of a piece of primary EU law – an Annex to the Act concerning the elections to the European Parliament – a resident of Gibraltar had been excluded from those elections. One consideration which appears to have played a certain role in the Court’s thinking is the fact that primary law is not open to review by the European Court of Justice (ECJ)
Keywords: EU Legislation on Criminal Justice, European Convention on Human Rights
