Memorandum by the TUC
Many apologies for the lateness of this response
to your request for the TUC's views about the implications for
social and employment policy of the Treaty's content relating
to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (ECFR) and the associated
clarification protocol which mentions the UK.
The TUC is the national trade union centre for
Great Britain. We represent people at work, especially through
our 59 affiliated unions and their 6.5 million members.
The TUC strongly supports the European Charter
of Fundamental Rights which was originally adopted in Nice in
2000, and to which the UK is a signatory. We believe that the
Charter sets out what would be generally regarded as the human
rights which people in Europe have a right to expect, and is in
accord with the UN Declaration on Human Rights, the European Convention
on Human Rights and, with specific reference to workplace rights,
the core labour conventions of the International Labour Organisation.
We have supported the campaigns of the European Trade Union Confederation,
of which the TUC is an affiliate, to have the European Charter
included in the EU Reform Treaty with legally binding effect,
and we welcome the decision of the Council of Ministers to do
so.
Our concerns therefore relate to the associated
clarification protocol, which we understand relates specifically
only to Chapter 4 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.
We understand that the purpose of the protocol is to ensure that
the inclusion of the Charter in the EU Reform Treaty will not
allow the European Court of Justice to add to existing UK laws
by extrapolating from the rights set out in Chapter 4 of the European
Charter.
The TUC has two principal concerns on how the
Protocol will operate, although of course ultimately this will
be determined by the Courts. Firstly, the TUC is concerned that
the Protocol may hinder the use of the European Court of Justice
to ensure access to existing EU based workers' rights. It has
been the experience of unions in the past that many rights which
we believe to be set down in legislation can only be obtained
in practice through the use of the courts. In recent years, the
ECJ has drawn on the existing Charter when interpreting EU employment
directives. We would consider it unacceptable for the protocol
to restrict that use of the European Court of Justice in the future.
Secondly the TUC are concerned that the protocol
could prevent UK citizens from using the European Court of Justice
to obtain the same rights at work as citizens in other EU countries,
and that the difference in rights thus provided to British workers
and other EU workers would inevitably widen over time.
January 2008
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