Fundamental values, principles, and rights after the Treaty of Lisbon: the long journey toward a EU system

The European Union, with its multilevel structure, appears today as one of the world’s most complexly interconnected system for the protection of fundamental rights. But a long journey was necessary to transform the original European Economic Community of 1958, built on a foundation of market values, into the present-day Union. The full protection of individual rights has been a progressive achievement, an evolutional process in which general (if not external) values gradually turned into fundamental principles and were finally enshrined as individual fundamental rights. This process, however, is flexible and the belonging to one of these categories does not impede the inclusion in one (or more) of the remaining ones. However, before we dwell on such a process, it will be useful to analyze the meaning and the implications of those categories in the current EU and TFEU treaties after the Lisbon reform.