The Limits of EU Conditionality: Minority Rights in Slovakia
Publisher: Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe Volume: 38 pages, pdf Description: Throughout much of the history of the European Community (EC) and later the European Union (EU), no straightforward solution has been sought by the main European institutional actors to address the need for including human rights provisions in the legislative context. It was not deemed desirous for the European Community to expand its activities, and therefore also its legislation, to any domain that did not pertain to the optimum regulation of the ‘open market’. Instead of introducing the relevant legislation directly, the need to include human rights at the European level was therefore inserted into the EC’s legal framework by means of often contradictory judicial decisions by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). At the same time, human rights clauses have become increasingly attached to the evolution of the EU’s external policy.