‘A New Legal Order of International Law’: On the Relationship between Public International Law and European Union Law after Kadi

This chapter seeks to clarify the relationship between international law and the EU legal order — a question that is often reduced to whether World Trade Organization law has or should have direct effect within the EU legal order. Accordingly, there is a wealth of academic literature on that topic which often, however, neglects to put the question into the wider context of how general international law interacts with EU law. This question was brought to the forefront again in the so-called ‘terrorist cases’. There, the relationship between United Nations (UN) law and EU law was examined in...

This chapter seeks to clarify the relationship between international law and the EU legal order — a question that is often reduced to whether World Trade Organization law has or should have direct effect within the EU legal order. Accordingly, there is a wealth of academic literature on that topic which often, however, neglects to put the question into the wider context of how general international law interacts with EU law. This question was brought to the forefront again in the so-called ‘terrorist cases’. There, the relationship between United Nations (UN) law and EU law was examined in great detail since it was the pivotal point of the judgments. It is argued Kadi does not represent the ultimate step by which EU law emancipates itself from public international law (PIL) in order to become a fully self-contained regime. Kadi is not völkerrechtsunfreundlich. In that respect, it is worth bearing in mind that, unlike the US Supreme Court in Medellin, the ECJ has not denied the conferral of rights granted by PIL but remedied the latter's deficiencies. Therefore, in the long run, the Court's judgment in Kadi might even strengthen international law in the way the Solange I judgment of the German Constitutional Court led to the evolution of human rights law in the ECJ's own jurisprudence.