Human rights and general principles: beyond the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

This chapter discusses the dialectic relationship of general principles and the evolution of human rights in the EU legal order. Human (or fundamental) rights are of specific signifcance for general principles as an area of reference in a number of ways: in regard to the methodology of defining and identifying general principles; their link to constitutional values of the EU, the relationship between different sources of human rights in the EU; the relationship between unwritten general principles and a codified source; the specific, active and multidimensional dynamics of general principles in the context of fundamental rights; the relationship of general principles in the area of fundamental rights with their codification in the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights; and their possible continued relevance for courts in adjudicating human rights in the UK in post-Brexit.