By incorporating the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights into the Constitutional Treaty the symbolic role and visibility of fundamental rights in the Union’s legal system has been raised.120 Will the Charter thus influence the process of balancing in cases of clashes between fundamental rights and fundamental freedoms? Some commentators emphasise that by granting a fundamental
117 Agerbeek, Freedom of Expression and Free Movement in the Brenner Corridor: the Schmidberger Case, 29 (2004) EL Rev., 266.
118 Schmidberger (supra note 2), para 69.
119 Karner (supra note 109).
120 Fossum/Menendez, The Draft Constitutional Treaty. Between Problem-Solving Treaty and Rights-Based Constitution, European Institute of Public Administration, Working Paper 2005/W/04, p. 27.
status to civic, political and social rights; the Charter denied such a status to the four fundamental economic freedoms.121 As it has been demonstrated in this paper the Court interpreted the exceptions to the fundamental freedoms through a systematic interpretation of the Community law as a whole and ac-cording to some authors one might be inclined to think that the Charter rein-forces such an approach by means of providing guidance because fundamental rights might be read as a numerus clausus of exceptions.122 According to some opinions
“the different abstract weighting of fundamental rights versus fundamental freedoms propitiated by the Charter might lead to a different structuring of the weighting and balancing of them in case of conflict, and more specifically, to the shifting of the burden of argumentation in favour of fundamental rights”.123 The question of an order of rank and degrees of fundamentality can be an-swered neither in abstract terms nor in an absolute manner. It remains to be seen whether the statement of Advocate General Jacobs that
“the cases, in which a Member State will invoke the necessity to protect fun-damental right to justify a restriction on the funfun-damental freedom, may be-come more frequent in the future”124
will prove to be true. The Court will then more often be faced with the need to reconcile the requirements of protection of fundamental rights with those arising from the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Treaty. Given the wide margin of discretion accorded to the Member States, the Court plays a supervi-sory role in scrutinising whether a fair balance has been struck between the conflicting interests. As some authors put it:
“It is a common-place for judges to seek to resolve conflicts between “con-stitutional”, “fundamental”, or “human rights” (…) by balancing one against the other.”125
The thesis put forward in this paper is that the process of balancing conflicting interests has to be anchored in the concept of allowable restrictions which can
121 Ibid., p. 27; see also Menendez, Between Treaty and Constitution: A Deliberative-de-mocratic Critique of the Substantive Content of the Draft Constitution of the European Union, available at <www.arena.uio.no/events/documents/Paper_000.pdf> (last visited 2nd May 2005), p. 31.
122 Fossum/Menendez, The Draft Constitutional Treaty. Between Problem-Solving Treaty and Rights-Based Constitution, European Institute of Public Administration, Working Paper 2005/W/04, p. 28.
123 Ibid., p. 28.
124 Schmidberger (supra note 2), para 89.
125 Greer, “Balancing” and the European Court of Human Rights: A Contribution to the Habermas-Alexy Debate, (2004) Cambridge Law Journal, 412.
be imposed on fundamental right at issue. The freedom of expression, despite its undeniable significance in a democratic society, is not absolute. Nor is the free movement of goods. The process of balancing demands a broad inquiry into what is the exact scope of the fundamental right in question. The ECJ re-peatedly and overtly ruled that fundamental rights are subject to restrictions.
There is considerable uniformity of view in this regard, but more disagreement and hence less certainty with regard to the scope of allowable restrictions. Yet before any process of balancing can begin and any of the interests can tip the balance, the exact scope of the fundamental right has to be determined through recourse to the restrictions which this right allows. The relevance of this thesis is readily apparent in the light of the criticisms levelled at the lack of a coherent approach by the ECJ in determining the range of restrictions which fundamental rights allow.126 This paper advocates therefore a more wide-rang-ing inquiry into the exact scope of the fundamental rights guaranteed in the legal order of the European Union.
126 Stieglitz (supra note 4), p. 127.
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