European Exceptionalism and the EU's Accession to the ECHR

In its December 2014 opinion, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rejected the draft accession agreement that would have enabled the European Union (EU) to accede to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms on the grounds of its incompatibility with the EU's constitutional structure. The opinion was widely and immediately criticized as evidence of the CJEU's unwillingness to be bridled by another international court and its anxiety over losing its primacy within Europe's juridical space. This article argues that the Luxembourg court's reasoning exemplifies a problematic attitude of 'European exceptionalism' that has deep roots within the philosophy of the European integration project. According to this narrative, the enlightened character of supranational institutions ought to exempt them from the constraints designed to check more imperfect forms of political organization such as nation states. The article argues that this conviction is not only ill-founded but also provides another reason why the EU, just like the sovereign states it has been set up to constrain, needs external human rights scrutiny.