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The Charter for Fundamental Rights is, if not its own child, a god child of Germany. Due to the efforts of the German government alone, the consolidation of the protection of fundamental rights within the European Union came on the agenda of the European Council. During the German presidency it was decided to convene a body of representatives of the heads of state and governments and of the parliaments to draw up a charter of fundamental rights a procedure further elaborated at the Tampere meeting of the European Council. By putting forward as representative of the German government a former head of state, who was not only an outstanding expert in constitutional law, but had also been a member and president of the constitutional court that had forced the Court of Justice of the European Communities into recognizing the relevance of fundamental rights to EC law, it became virtually impossible not to have him elected as president of the body charged with drawing up the Charter. Thus, also decisive influence on the actual process of drawing up the Charter was in German hands. The impetus for this German initiative was not merely political but constitutional. Article 23 of the Grundgesetz imposes the duty Aparticipate in the development of the European Union which [...] provides a protection of fundamental rights essentially equivalent to that of this Constitution.@ The perception was that this required more than the open formulation of Article 6 (2) of the TEU, and the protection provided by the Court of Justice needed a clearer articulation of the actual rights so protected. Also, the assumption underlying this national constitutional provision is that EU and EC measures, or national measures required by EU and EC, enter into the field of competence to which the national constitution applies otherwise there would not need to be a national constitutional concern about protecting fundamental rights as protected by the national constitution itself. Two questions can therefore be raised as concerns the Charter as eventually adopted: what is the relation between the Charter and national constitutions; and what is the scope of the Charter as concerns Member States= action. I address these questions briefly in this essay. Finally, we briefly turn to the question whether the Charter has in effect provided what the German Constitution asked for.
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