The “46+1 Group” has made significant progress on the path to EU accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) during its 18^th and last meeting from 14 to 17 March 2023. All the issues it was hoping to agree on have now been addressed.

To ensure that the Committee of Ministers’ monitoring process will remain effective and fair after the EU’s accession, the Group found consensus on the voting rules of the Committee of Ministers which will be applied when that body supervises the implementation by the EU of the Strasbourg Court’s judgments (Art. 7 of the 2013 draft accession agreement).

The EU informed that it would resolve internally the only remaining issue on the situation of EU acts in the area of the Common Foreign and Security Policy that are excluded from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. We will keep the Council of Europe Steering Committee for human rights informed on the progress made in this regard. 

After a detailed editorial review of the revised texts, the Group thus reached a provisional agreement on the resulting package of revised draft accession instruments. The Group submitted its final report to the Council of Europe Steering Committee for human rights, which will be as of now the framework for additional consultations among all the negotiating parties as needed.

Apart from the ongoing work on the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the accession process still requires several steps, including a positive opinion from the Court of Justice of the EU and ratifications by the European Parliament and national parliaments. Nevertheless, this week’s results in Strasbourg represent an important step forward towards the EU’s accession to the ECHR.

Negotiations on the EU accession to the ECHR started in 2010. After three years, the (then) 47 Member States of the Council of Europe and the European Union reached a first provisional agreement. The Court of Justice of the EU declared the 2013 draft agreement incompatible with the EU Treaties in its Opinion 2/13 of 18 December 2014. The negotiations were postponed for a few years and resumed in September 2020. The Commission has been conducting the negotiations on behalf of the EU. 

Accession to the ECHR will ensure that the EU is subject to the scrutiny of the European Court of Human Rights and to the same system of international human rights oversight as its member states. This will in turn guarantee that the human rights of all EU citizens are better protected and European human rights standards are further upheld.