Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Very good to see so many of you here. I'm delighted to welcome

who has recently moved from Edinburgh to Maynooth, New University in Ireland.

And he is going to talk on the subject

to that which he is the most expert, namely

fundamental rights and revisiting the question of whether there should be

accession by the EU to the ECHL.

Tobias, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everyone for coming.

Thank you for having me.

The last time I was in this building, I did a job interview.

I didn't get the job, so, you know.

Now I'm here.

I'll leave us motivated, but I hope you just have pointed out of it.

Now, thank you very much, and so EU accession to the ECHR is on the table again, I have to discover, unfortunately, the EU Commission published a paper on the rule of law and all sorts of things

that concern the EU nowadays, apart from Brexit.

And one of the things they still want to achieve is the EU's accession to the ACHR. It's of course never gone away. It's been a topic

for the last 40 odd years or so since the late 70s. And it was not backed twice by the Court of

Justice, in opinion 294 and 213. Now, I used to be quite in favour of it, I must say. I wrote about it,

so you want to be in favour of something. Write about it or you want to be dead against it, otherwise,

it's no fun. And I was surprised at the time by Opinion 213, which robustly rejected any attempt at getting the EU to become

a party to the ECHR formally.

And the reason why I was surprised and I'm a little bit annoyed by it was because the Court

...