This event is organised by the European Union Law Working Group and gives participants an opportunity to discuss the important judgments recently delivered by the CJEU.
About the judgment:
The interplay of EU law and fundamental social rights is shaped by a series of landmark cases, such as the Viking-Laval saga, AGET Iraklis, or AMS. These cases, decided by the CJEU’s Grand Chamber, have drawn criticism for privileging market freedoms over social rights. Similarly, another series of landmark cases frames the horizontal effect of the fundamental rights in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, i.e., whether they can be invoked in private disputes.
The decision to be discussed in this seminar, however, has gone missing from both groups of landmark cases: C-196/23 Plamaro. Though ostensibly a technical interpretation of the Collective Redundancies Directive 98/59/EC, the CJEU’s Second Chamber, ruling without an Advocate General, crucially restricts the Charter’s horizontality, the effectiveness of the EU’s fundamental rights catalogue, and its indivisibility. The decision explicitly confirms the Grand Chamber’s 2014 decision in AMS that denied the horizontal effect of Art 27 CFR (right to information and consultation within the undertaking). Moreover, Plamaro extends AMS to Art 30 CFR (right to protection against unjustified dismissal) equally denying horizontal effect. Both Charter provisions are categorised as devoid of substantive obligations and, therefore, lack horizontality and cannot serve in reviewing national law transposing an EU Directive under the Charter. In other words, the Second Chamber considers the rights in Arts 27 and 30 CFR to lack substance and therefore justiciability.
The Second Chamber thereby extends a third category of ineffective Charter provisions, beyond the textually mandated dichotomy between Charter rights and principles, and their different justiciabilities rooted in the Charter’s general provisions. By so far including only social, more specifically labour rights, this category entrenches a hierarchy of rights that undermines the Charter’s effectiveness and its very constitutional promise of indivisibility giving equal value to all types of fundamental rights. Moreover, Plamaro disrupts most of the scholarship developed after C-569/16 Bauer which had posited a trend toward horizontality for most CFR rights, stronger EU social and labour rights, and the capacity of EU legislative instruments to inform Charter obligations.
The European Union Law Working Group is a forum where EUI members, external researchers, and practitioners working on European Union law discuss their work and interact with other scholars. All interested fellows, PhD researchers, professors and visiting academics are invited to participate.