A PDF version of this book is available
for free in open access via www.oup.com/uk as well as the OAPEN Library
platform, www.oapen.org. It has been made available under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license and is part of the
OAPEN-UK research project. Comprehensively examining the legal effects of EU
concluded treaties, this book provides a thorough analysis of this increasingly
important and rapidly growing area of EU law. The EU has concluded more than
1000 treaties including recently its first human rights treaty (the UN Rights of
Persons with Disability Convention). These agreements are regularly invoked in
litigation in the Courts of the member states and before the EU courts in
Luxembourg but their ramifications for the EU legal order and that of the member
states remains underexplored. Through analysis of over 300 cases, the author
finds evidence of a twin-track approach whereby the Court of Justice of the
European Union (CJEU) adopts a maximalist approach to Treaty enforcement where
EU agreements are invoked in challenges to member state level action whilst
largely insulating EU action from meaningful review vis-à-vis agreements. The
book also reveals novel findings regarding the use of EU agreements in EU level
litigation including: the types and which specific EU agreements (including the
types of provisions) have arisen in litigation; the nature of the proceedings
(preliminary rulings or direct actions) and the number of occasions in which
they have been addressed in challenges to member state or EU action and the
outcomes; who has been litigating (individuals, institutions, or member states)
and which domestic courts have been referring questions to the CJEU. The
significance of the judicial developments in this area are situated within the
context of the domestic constitutional ramifications for member state legal
orders thus revealing a neglected dimension in the constitutionalization debates
which traditionally emphasized the ramifications of internal EU law for the
domestic constitutional order without expressly accommodating the constitutional
significance of this external category of EU law nor the different challenges
that this poses domestically. This volume will serve as a reference point for
future work in this area and will also be of assistance to EU law practitioners
dealing with EU agreements
