Abstract

The essay aims to explore – in the aftermath of the reopening of the negotiations for the EU accession to the ECHR – how the CJEU case law read the competition between the two European Charters of Rights and, more specifically, how the Luxembourg Court applied the so-called Convention test under the homogeneity clause enshrined in Article 52, par. 3, of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. By means of this analysis, it may be possible to grasp some key issues of the present relationship between the two catalogues of rights and their respective courts in the shadow of the accession process. The protection of fundamental rights in Europe – even just examined through the glasses of the horizontal relations between the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention of Human Rights – still resembles the appearance of a «crowded house» in search of a harmonious point of balance.