A comparative framing of fundamental rights challenges to social crisis measures in the Eurozone

The Eurozone crisis and its management prompted dramatic changes to social rights and entitlements, specifically in the Member States which were most severely affected by the economic downturn. Fundamental rights, including fundamental social rights, from different sources can be a means to contest those crisis-imposed changes to social rights. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative framing of fundamental rights challenges to social crisis measures in the Eurozone. The paper examines the decline in social rights, broadly defined, in a number of Eurozone Member States intensely affected by the crisis, and analyses the content, location and background of fundamental rights' challenges made to crisis-imposed changes to work and welfare rights in those States. The analysis prompts difficult yet central questions of the role of the EU as a human rights actor, the attitudes of courts in fundamental rights cases, as well as the significance of the Charter as a guarantor of fundamental social rights in the EU. * Claire Kilpatrick is Professor of International and European Labour and Social Law, EUI, claire.kilpatrick@eui.eu; Bruno De Witte is Professor of European Law at Maastricht University and at the EUI, bruno.dewitte@maastrichtuniversity.nl. This paper forms part of a project we directed at the EUI on Social Rights in Times of Crisis: The Role of Fundamental Rights Challenges. The results of that project will be published in a guest-edited issue of the European Journal of Social Law.We are grateful to the Law Department and the Robert Schuman Centre of the EUI for supporting this research.