Theoretical Aspects of Fundamental Rights in the European Union

From the sixties onward, and especially after the Treaty of the European Union, the Court of Justice of the European Communities (and behind it, legal dogmatics) had been constructing a partial and fragmentary outline of a European Community Theory on Fundamental Rights. The Treaty of Lisbon granted legal standing (at the same level as the founding treaties) to the catalog contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (in its 2007 version) and, consequently, made it mandatory to complete this outline with the contributions of this text, which now assumed major importance for the exegete. This paper makes it clear that the so-called fundamental Community rights are not fundamental rights in the sense ascribed to the term by constitutional dogmatics, especially because they do not possess unconditioned validity for the states. Nevertheless, most of the elements of this dogmatics turn out to be applicable to fundamental Community rights, and many innovations and teachings for the development of European Community Law and, indirectly, for the development of state constitutional law itself, can be derived from the study of these elements. Among traits to be highlighted from this new Theory of Fundamental Rights in the European Union we could mention, for example, the international broadening of the catalogue of rights, the consideration of social rights of assistance as authentic rights, the broadening of the circle of stakeholders, the weight accorded to comparative interpretation or the consolidation of the rule of the maximum standard, all of that in line with the most recent and most advanced concepts of comparative dogmatics of fundamental rights.