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49 Irish Jurist (N.S.) 49 (2013)
The Domestic Impact of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

handle is hein.journals/irishjur45 and id is 57 raw text is: THE DOMESTIC IMPACT OF THE EU CHARTER OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS GRAINNE DE BURCA* Abstract: The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms has been in force as a legally binding source of EU law since late 2009. This article examines the growing importance of the Charter within EU law, and sets out to examine what impact, if any, this modern and relatively distinctive corpus of legal rights has begun to have within domestic law and litigation. It does so by means of a study of Irish case law since the Charter gained binding legal force late in 2009. The study finds that whereas the Charter has increasingly become a primary source of reference for the Court of Justice (the CJEU) for rights claims within EU law, and the number of cases in which the CJEU invokes and applies Charter provisions has also risen significantly, the response of the Irish courts has been considerably more cautious. Despite having become more receptive to claims based on the European Convention on Human Rights (the ECHR) since the European Convention on Human Rights Act 2003 was adopted in Ireland, and despite their general receptiveness to claims based on EU law and their readiness to make preliminary references to the CJEU, the Irish courts have been much less ready to interpret and apply provisions of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights despite the increasing invocation of the Charter by litigants in Irish cases. Nonetheless, it seems more likely that this reluctance is based on the relative novelty and unfamiliarity of the Charter on the part of Irish courts, and their uncertainty about its scope of application, than on the kinds of sovereignty concerns or Eurosceptical reaction that may have underlain the resistance oflrish courts to the influence of the European Convention on Human Rights in previous decades. INTRODUCTION Ireland's relationship with Europe, and the relationship between the Irish legal system and the two major European legal systems-the European Union as well as the Council of Europe's European Convention on Human Rights- continues to be the subject of lively and even passionate debate. Issues of major social importance, such as abortion and the impact of the ECHR on Irish law and policy on the one hand, and issues of major economic importance like the euro crisis on the other, are in the headlines daily. The aim of this lecture is to reflect, since the coming into force of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as a binding source of law in 2009, on what impact this new instrument and * This article is based on the text of the Brian Walsh Memorial lecture given in Dublin in November 2012. I am grateful to Chris Spelman and Wouter Deleersnyder for excellent research assistance. 49

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