INTERNATIONAL LAW, Sixth edition

370 international law
the Court. 158 Indeed the question has also been raised and considered
without resolution as to whether the Community should itself accede to
the European Convention on Human Rights. 159
The Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty), 1992 amended
the Treaty of Rome and established the European Union, founded on the
European Communities supplemented by the policies and forms of cooperation
established under the 1992 Treaty. Article F(2) of Title I noted
that the Union ‘shall respect fundamental rights’, as guaranteed by the
European Convention on Human Rights and as they result from common
constitutional traditions, ‘as general principles of Community law’.
Under article K.1 of Title VI, the member states agreed that asylum, immigration,
drug, fraud, civil and criminal judicial co-operation, customs
co-operation and certain forms of police co-operation would be regarded
as ‘matters of common interest’, which under article K.2 would be dealt
with in compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights
and the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951. The provisions
under Title V on the Common Foreign and Security Policy may also
impact upon human rights, so that, for instance, the European Union
sent its own human rights observers to Rwanda within this framework. 160
From the early 1990s, the European Communities began to include human
rights references in its trade and aid policies, formalised in article
177(2), and from the mid-1990s, all trade and co-operation agreements
contained provisions concerning respect for human rights. 161
The Treaty of Amsterdam, which came into force on 1 May 1999, inserted
a new article 6 into the Treaty on European Union, which stated that
the European Union ‘is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy,
158 See e.g. Rutili [1975] ECR 1219; Valsabbia v. Commission [1980] ECR 907; Kirk [1984]
ECR 2689; Dow Chemical Ibérica v. Commission [1989] ECR 3165; ERT [1991] ECR I-2925
and X v. Commission [1992] ECR II-2195 and 16 HRLJ, 1995, p. 54. Note also the Joint
Declaration on Human Rights, 1977, by which the three EC institutions undertook to
respect the European Convention on Human Rights, OJ 1977 C103/1.
159 See e.g. ‘Accession of the Communities to the European Convention on Human Rights’,
EC Bulletin, Suppl. 2/79. Note that the President of the European Court of Human
Rights suggested in January 2003 that the EU should accede to the Convention: see
www.echr.coe.int/eng/Edocs/SpeechWildhaber.htm.
160 See J. Van Der Kaauw, ‘European Union’, 13 NQHR, 1995, p. 173. Note, however, that the
European Court of Justice held in Opinion 2/94 that the EC had no competence to accede
to the European Convention as it did not have any general human rights competence,
[1996] ECR I-1759.
161 See e.g. E. Riedel and M. Will, ‘Human Rights Clauses in External Agreements’ in Alston,
The EU and Human Rights, p. 723.