Will the European Union accede to the European Convention on Human Rights? ‘Before’ and ‘after’ the Opinion 2/13 of the ECJ

The article examines the European Union’s accession to the 1950 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. To this end, two stages of accession are being examined: the stage before the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its Opinion 2/13 of 18 December 2014 on the compatibility of the Draft agreement on the accession of the European Union to the Convention with the Treaty on the European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the stage after this Opinon. In the frames of the first stage the prerequisites for the Court of Justice of the European Union’s making the Opinion 2/13, the content of the Draft agreement on the accession of the European Union to the Convention and the main provisions of the legal position of the Court of Justice of the European Union regarding the incompatibility of the Draft agreement on the accession of the European Union to the Convention are analysed. The second stage of the accession examines the intentions and real steps of the institutional mechanism of the European Union and the Council of Europe’s bodies for the implementation of accession, as well as possible ways of eliminating the inconsistencies of the Draft agreement on the accession of the European Union to the Convention identified by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its Opinion 2/13. Considering that the preparation of the first draft of the EU accession agreement to the Convention took about three years, noting the lack of an updated draft accession agreement (which could have taken into account the position of the European Union Court of Justice expressed in its Opinion 2/13), taking into account the necessity of the compatibility assessment of the new draft agreement on the accession of the European Union to the Convention with the EU by the European Union Court of Justice, there is a reason to believe that the issue of the accession of the European Union to the European Convention on Human Rights will have been open for a long time. At the same time, following the adoption of the Opinion 2/13, both the Commission of the European Union and the European Parliament have repeatedly confirmed the continuity of the European Union’s course for accession, and the fact that in early 2020 it was decided to extend the deadlines for the development of legal instruments establishing models of the European Union’s accession to the Convention in the ad hoc group cannot but confirm the perspective of accession at least in the long run.