The Fundamentalisation of Social Rights

Abstract

The place and legal value of social rights in the EU Charter is only one episode (albeit a long drawn out episode, lasting since 2000)in the ongoing struggle about the ‘fundamentalisation’ of social rights, which is the subject of the contributions to this collective Working Paper. In the European Union itself, another arena of this struggle was opened up more recently by the judgments of the European Court of Justice in the cases Laval, Viking and Rüffert, which are amply discussed in several contributions of the Working Paper. Issues relating to the recognition of a fundamental legal status to social rights also occur in other contexts than that of the European Union, namely in the development and monitoring of international human rights norms, and also in the national legal context. This Working Paper contains the combined output of current doctoral research at the EUI in these two fields: of international and European human rights law, and of comparative and European labour law. The contributions which the reader will find in the following pages take stock of the current debate on the fundamental status of social rights, and raise a number of interesting perspectives on how to carry that debate forward.