Just in time for Christmas, on 18 December 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its Opinion 2/13 on the Union’s planned accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). To the surprise of most, the CJEU found the draft agreement on the accession of the Union to the ECHR incompatible with the Union’s primary (read: constitutional) law.

Not only did the CJEU find the accession agreement incompatible with the Union’s constituent treaties. Its Opinion reads like a direct and unequivocal attack on the accession agreement and, as I will come back to, it seems to be very difficult to satisfy the CJEU’s objections by way of amending the accession agreement. Instead of the expected Christmas present of a signable accession agreement, the Court brought the negotiators a bag of coal.

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