Gráinne de Búrca

Courses

• European Human Rights Law

  This course aims to introduce the system of human rights protection in Europe, and primarily the system established by the Council of Europe’s European Convention on Human Rights. This regional human rights system, now over 60 years old, is widely considered to be the most effective human rights system in the world, and to have generated some of the most extensive and important jurisprudence on human rights issues. Its case law has been influential and has been cited by human rights courts and constitutional courts across the globe. Nevertheless, despite its successes, the ECHR system faces significant challenges and is under great strain due to its overwhelming case overload. It is also under attack from some for being excessively deferential to states under its ‘margin of appreciation’ doctrine, while from others for interfering too much with the legitimate policy-making authority of democratic states. The course will examine the functioning and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, and the role it plays in the legal systems of the Council of Europe Member States. The course will appraise some of its strengths and its weaknesses, the moves to reform the ECHR system, and its future prospects. We will examine some areas of substantive case law in depth, and will also consider the relationship between the Council of Europe and the ECHR system on the one hand, and the developing human rights system of the European Union on the other.

• European Union law at a time of Nationalist Illiberalism

  Recent years have seen the spread of nationalist political illiberalism in many parts of the world, including within formerly consolidated democracies. The spread of nationalist illiberalism has generally featured a decline in the rule of law, the undermining of independent institutions such as courts, a rollback of human rights protections and rejection of or withdrawal from international institutions. The European Union is an experiment in regional integration which seemed to exemplify the opposite to nationalist illiberalism: a supranational elite-driven project of economic integration, reuniting Eastern and Western Europe through a process of democratization, with strong emphasis on legal integration, independent supranational institutions, and the rule of law. But after over a decade of economic and other crises besetting the EU (Brexit, Covid, Ukraine etc), the rise of nationalist illiberalism across Europe - particularly but not only in Poland and Hungary - warrants a closer look at the evolution of this unique regional political entity. The course will revisit some of the major legal and constitutional doctrines on which the European Union has been founded – supremacy of EU law, the central role of the European Court of Justice, protection for fundamental rights and the rule of law – as well as a constitutional role for economic integration. The course will consider the extent to which European integration and the major doctrines of EU law might have fuelled the rise of nationalist illiberalism, as well as the extent to which EU law has been able to respond to nationalist and illiberal challenges.