The place of the European Convention on Human Rights within the legal order of the European Union has been the subject of much controversy over the past twenty years. It is now almost 25 years since the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg first referred specifically to the Human Rights Convention in one of its judgments. Since then it has considered and commented on almost all of the substantive articles of the Human Rights Convention in the context of European Community law.
For the first time, these references to the European Convention on Human Rights by the European Court of...