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Third working session — The future prospects
Moreover, the developments in the EU go hand in hand with relevant
improvements in the system of the European Convention, especially since
Protocol 11 opened the doors of the European Court of Strasbourg to claims
brought by individuals.
The rich and composite multilevel system of protection of fundamental
rights in Europe was driven by the implicit idea that the individual and his
rights enjoy better protection if an ‘external’ judicial control complements ‘in-
ternal’, domestic, judicial remedies.
The events of the first part of the 20th century resulted in a general distrust
of States’ capacity to adequately protect their citizens.
For this reason, the European Convention of Human Rights was signed
a few years after World War II, during the ‘age of rights’, as those times were
defined by Norberto Bobbio (
6
).
Similarly, the spirit of Van Gend was to give individuals the opportunity
to claim their rights against their State: to this end, national courts were em-
powered to act as part of the judicial branch of the European Community,
by applying European legislation and setting aside national legislation, and
they therefore developed a close relationship with the European Court of
Justice. This was the ‘genius’ of Van Gend which empowered the domestic
ordinary courts to do what in many cases their own legal system prevented
them from doing, that is, the judicial review of national legislation. Direct
effect entrusted all lower courts, rather than only Constitutional Courts,
with the power of performing the judicial review of legislation in relation to
European law, thus creating within the national legal orders a ‘second judicial
review of legislation’, parallel to the original one. As a consequence, as Weiler
pointed out years ago, the lower national courts became important vehicles
for popular engagement by individual and group interests against national
governments (
7
). The vigilance of individuals concerned to protect their rights
amounted to an effective supervision in addition to the supervision entrusted
(
6
) N. Bobbio,
L’età dei diritti
, Torino: Einaudi, 1990, for the English translation of the book see
N. Bobbio,
Age of Rights
, Blackwell Publisher 1996.
(
7
) J.H.H. Weiler,
The Constitution of Europe,
Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 192-195.
