2024-04-30 09:30:11
On several occasions, the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron has expressed the wish to revise the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union to include the freedom to resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion).
This proposal, already formulated in January 2022 in the context of the French presidency of the Council of the European Union, then reiterated on the occasion of the ceremony of the sealing of the Constitution on March 8, 2024 for the official integration of the freedom of resorting to abortion as a constitutional law, was once again expressed during the speech on Europe on April 25, 2024 at the Sorbonne.
This development defended by the Head of State concretizes his desire to go even further in guaranteeing this freedom: after constitutionalization, could we witness a Europeanization of the freedom to resort to abortion, by a revision of the Charter of Fundamental Rights?
Binding legal value
This text, which is the main source of protection of rights and freedoms by the European Union and which has the same legal value as the treaties on the Union, has had a turbulent history. Proclaimed at the time of the adoption of the Treaty of Nice in the year 2000, the Charter of Fundamental Rights was not integrated into the Treaty on the European Union, for essentially political reasons.
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The Charter subsequently appeared in the draft treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, but the lack of ratification of the project by the member states – notably France following the negative referendum of 2005 – prevented its entry into force. force.
It was only with the revision carried out by the Treaty of Lisbon signed in 2007 and which entered into force in 2009 that the Charter acquired a binding legal value equal to that of the treaties, but with all the same a certain hostility displayed, for different reasons, by certain Member States (in particular, the United Kingdom, Poland and the Czech Republic). The text thus establishes a list of rights and freedoms that the institutions of the Union and the Member States undertake to respect.
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This list cannot be exhaustive and the constitutional revision of March 2024 showed – if necessary – that the law can always evolve, in the direction of the extension of rights as well as a regression elsewhere. The same is true of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which could be augmented by new provisions, and why not of a woman’s freedom to have an abortion. However, such an undertaking is not easy.
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