European Values in the Charter of Fundamental Rights: An Introduction

• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Author: Alessandra Facchi,Nicola Riva
• Date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12308

Ratio Juris. Vol. 34 No. 1 March 2021 (3–5)

© (2021) The Authors. Ratio Juris, published by the University of Bologna and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

European Values in the Charter

of Fundamental Rights: An Introduction

ALESSANDRA FACCHI and NICOLA RIVA

The adoption of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, first pro-

claimed at the Nice European Council of December 2000, marked a qualitative change

in the nature of an organization that had previously been described— and is still being

described by many of its critics— as mainly interested in promoting economic coop-

eration and development. Since then, the European Union has been able to refer to

the Charter as its “positive moral code,” a source of normative commitments that was

given binding legal force with the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007 (entered into force in 2009).

According to its drafters, the Charter was aimed at reaffirming a catalogue of

fundamental rights that were considered to be already part of European Union law.

The preamble of the Charter explicitly mentions as its reference sources the consti-

tutional traditions and the international obligations common to the Member States,

the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental

Freedoms, the European Social Charters adopted by the European Union and the

Council of Europe, and the case- law of the Court of Justice of the European Union

and of the European Court of Human Rights.

The Charter is more than a mere “summary” of what had already been achieved

by the European Union and its Member States in the field of fundamental rights.

Among the innovative features of the Charter is the fact that it organizes fundamen-

tal rights around six key concepts— dignity, freedoms, equality, solidarity, citizens’

rights, and justice— that can be understood as the values providing a foundation for

fundamental rights and that those rights articulate.1

The European research project NoVaMigra: Norms and Values in the European

Migration and Refugee Crisis, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon

2020 program,2 includes among its tasks a reconstruction of the normative commit-

ments of the European Union in light of the Charter, that is, of the set of values,

1 For an analysis of the Charter’s normative content in light of the decisions of the European

courts with a focus on the ideas of dignity, freedoms, equality, and solidarity, see A. Facchi, P.

Parolari, and N. Riva, Values in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: A Legal- Philosophical Analysis

with a Focus on Migrants’ Rights (Turin: Giappichelli, 2019). The book is open access and can be

downloaded from the NoVaMigra project website at https://novam igra.eu/index.php?c=50_

publi cations or from the publisher’s website at https://www.giapp ichel li.it/value s- in- the- eu-

chart er- of- funda menta l- right s- 22575.

2 The NoVaMigra project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 re-

search and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 770330.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.