EU: Study on Conflicts between new and old “Fundamental Rights”

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D. | March 23, 2011

I recommend to yor attention a recent study that was written by two legal experts of the masonic Université Libre de Bruxelles and financed by the European Commission. It deals with the “search of a balance between the right of equality and other fundamental rights”.

The paper is illustrative of the chaotic status of contemporary “human rights law”, which in turn is the result of a long standing effort by some politicians and legal theorists to subvert the moral order.

In short, what has happened is the following:

While the classical human rights catalogues (such as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights) contained only a fairly short list of fundamental rights (such as the right to life, or religious freedom), we recently have witnessed a veritable inflation of newly discovered rights. A telling example is the EU Fundamental Rights Charter, which reveals a strange tendency to describe everything that is found politically desirable (for example, “a high level of consumer protection” or “paid holidays for employees”) as “fundamental rights”.

It is no wonder, then, that where the number of such “fundamental rights” increases, there will also be an increasing number of cases where such “rights” stand in contradiction with each other.

That means that the addition of each new “fundamental right” has the effect of weakening the existing ones.

Nowhere does this become clearer than in the context of “equality”, the new fetish of EU fundamental rights policy. Indeed, “equality” was as such never considered a stand-alone “fundamental right”, until it was included as one in the EU Fumdamental Rights Charter. Since then, it is used to subvert pre-existing fundamental rights that have older and better credentials, such as the right to conscientious objection, the right to religious freedom, or the right to life.

The new report is quite illustrative for this insidious strategy: it asserts that “virtue of the principle of the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights, the a priori non-existence of a hierarchy of rights is generally accepted, except when international law lays down precedence criteria”.

With due respect, this is nonsense. No reasonable person would ever think of putting “consumer protection” or “paid holidays” on a par with the right to life, or with personal freedom.

But this putting on the same level of old and new “human rights” has of course a political purpose. You discover it when you go on to read what the report has to say about the “potential conflicts between the principle of non-discrimination and the right to respect for the private life”, or “between non-discrimination and conscientious objection”.

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