Grigonis, Simas

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has recently assessed the compatibility of the reformatory Investment Court System (ICS) of the EU’s trade agreement with Canada (CETA). In the Opinion 1/17, the CJEU ruled the ICS mechanism to be compatible with EU law. This article provides a comprehensive critical assessment of the ICS mechanism and its potential adverse effects on uniform interpretation of EU law. It is proposed that,despite the favourable assessment of the CJEU, the ICS mechanism could result in indirect negative effects on the uniform interpretation of EU law and the autonomy of EU legal order. Involvement of the CJEU in the proceedings of the ICS mechanism is suggested as a possible option to resolve all the incompatibilities of the ICS with the autonomy of the EU legal order,and to ensure the CJEU’s exclusive right to interpret EU law.

Despite the fact that EU was acknowledged to ensure human rights protection level equivalent to the one ensured under European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), it is doubtful if the EU was able to ensure human rights in time of recent migrant crisis. It is argued in the Article that, absence of comprehensive EU-level migrant policy restricted EU's ability to prevent the crisis and to mitigate its consequences as well as human rights violations. In addition, being oriented to ex post rights defense, EU's system was also practically unsuitable to defend the rights of the asylum seekers after the violations actually occurred. It is proposed that EU should address migration issues immediately by introducing major migration policy reform.

On December 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union adopted one of the most controversial decisions in recent decades—the famous Opinion 2/13 that precluded the European Union from acceding to the European Convention on Human Rights. This article engages in the analysis of the co-respondent mechanism - one of the most significant features of the Draft Agreement for the accession of the European Union to the Convention. The co-respondent mechanism was intentionally designed to preserve the specific characteristics of the European Union law by precluding the European Court of Human Rights from solving the complex questions of the internal competence division of the European Union. However, notwithstanding that the European Commission and most of the Member States had not seen any significant threats caused by the mechanism, the Luxembourg court rejected the mechanism due to the European Union’s motives for the protection of autonomy. This article analyzes and assesses the objections presented by the Court.