Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I Constitutional and institutional questions
- 1 Direct effect and interpretation of international agreements in the recent case law of the European Court of Justice
- 2 Defining competence in EU external relations: lessons from the Treaty reform process
- 3 Article 47 TEU and the relationship between first and second pillar competences
- 4 EC law and UN Security Council Resolutions – in search of the right fit
- 5 Fundamental rights and the interface between second and third pillar
- 6 The EU as a party to international agreements: shared competences, mixed responsibilities
- 7 The Common Commercial Policy enhanced by the Reform Treaty of Lisbon?
- 8 The extent to which the EC legislature takes account of WTO obligations: jousting lessons from the European Parliament
- PART II Bilateral and regional approaches
- PART III Selected substantive areas
- Table of Treaty Provisions
- Index
1 - Direct effect and interpretation of international agreements in the recent case law of the European Court of Justice
from PART I - Constitutional and institutional questions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I Constitutional and institutional questions
- 1 Direct effect and interpretation of international agreements in the recent case law of the European Court of Justice
- 2 Defining competence in EU external relations: lessons from the Treaty reform process
- 3 Article 47 TEU and the relationship between first and second pillar competences
- 4 EC law and UN Security Council Resolutions – in search of the right fit
- 5 Fundamental rights and the interface between second and third pillar
- 6 The EU as a party to international agreements: shared competences, mixed responsibilities
- 7 The Common Commercial Policy enhanced by the Reform Treaty of Lisbon?
- 8 The extent to which the EC legislature takes account of WTO obligations: jousting lessons from the European Parliament
- PART II Bilateral and regional approaches
- PART III Selected substantive areas
- Table of Treaty Provisions
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The Community has wide treaty-making powers. The authors of the European Economic Community (EEC) Treaty were prudent and cautious on this, as on other major constitutional issues, and used the term ‘agreement’ rather than ‘treaty’, for example in the original Articles 113 and 228 of the Treaty, and that terminology is still generally used today.
Moreover, the EEC Treaty nowhere contained a general provision on the Community's treaty-making powers. The provision of Article 210 that ‘The Community shall have legal personality’, which was relied upon by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the ERTA case for that purpose, seems, as its very terms suggest, concerned not with the international legal personality of the Community, but with more mundane matters of domestic law. That is confirmed by Article 211, which concerns the legal capacity of the Community in the Member States. (Contrast Article 6 of the earlier, now defunct, European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) Treaty: ‘The Community shall have legal personality. In international relations, the Community shall enjoy the legal capacity it requires to perform its functions and attain its objectives.’)
Indeed, it would have been uncharacteristically presumptuous of the Treaty to purport to confer international legal personality on the Community. Moreover, the exercise of treaty-making powers depends in part on the attitude of third States.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Law and Practice of EU External RelationsSalient Features of a Changing Landscape, pp. 13 - 33Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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