The impact of EU law and the ECHR on national constitutional adjudication in the European legal space

This chapter describes the influence of European Union Law and the European Convention on Human Rights on the structure of constitutional adjudication, in particular in states with specialized constitutional courts. While these courts had held the monopoly on the judicial review of legislation before, the primacy of Union law substantially moved competences in this field to ordinary domestic courts. In states without constitutional review of legislation, it even moved competences not only within the judiciary but also between the three branches of the state. Similarly, the emergence of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights as constitutional courts of Europe has meant that the national constitutional courts have lost their power of the ‘final say’. Recent, sometimes hostile, jurisprudence by national constitutional courts towards the European courts can also be explained as reaction to this shift of power.