Acceso usuarios
Joseph H. H. Weiler
What if in, say, the implementation of Union law, it is found that the Union law violates a constitutional provision of the Member State protecting fundamental human rights?. Under the pre-Charter regime the resolution of such a conflict would proceed as follows. First, under CILFIT (Case 283/81 of 6 October 1982) the validity of the Union law would rest in the hands of the ECJ. A Member State court, even a court against whose decision there was a judicial remedy, would be required to make a preliminary reference for a finding of invalidity. Second, the ECJ would review the Union measure according to its human rights standards (informed, of course, by the constitutional traditions common to the Member States and the ECHR). The applicable human rights norm could not be dictated by the standard of level of protection of any given Member State (Hauer, Case 44/79 of 13 December 1979). If the ECJ were to find that the Union measure was not violative of human rights as defined by the ECJ, it would, by virtue of the principles of supremacy and equality of application of Union law, have to be followed by and within the Member States, even if a similar national measure would violate Member State constitutional provisions. There was a period in which some authors suggested that the ECJ would always have to adopt the highest level of protection to be found among the Member States. That nonsense has luckily been purged from most treatments of the subject matter.
