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de Vries, Sybe A. --- "The Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU’s ‘creeping’ competences: does the Charter have a centrifugal effect for fundamental rights in the EU?" [2017] ELECD 967; in Douglas-Scott, Sionaidh; Hatzis, Nicholas (eds), "Research Handbook on EU Law and Human Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 58

Book Title: Research Handbook on EU Law and Human Rights

Editor(s): Douglas-Scott, Sionaidh; Hatzis, Nicholas

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781782546399

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: The Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU’s ‘creeping’ competences: does the Charter have a centrifugal effect for fundamental rights in the EU?

Author(s): de Vries, Sybe A.

Number of pages: 41

Abstract/Description:

This powerful and dramatic scene of Euripides’ Medea, pictures Medea as a woman who does not passively sit back and accept the injustice of what has been happening to her. Not only does Euripides’ characterisation of Medea, who had just killed her sons, exhibit the inner emotions of passion, love and vengeance, his play could also be seen as a plea for women’s rights in a patriarchal society, where Medea makes it very clear that it is Jason who has acted out of his own selfishness. Others, however, read the Medea as an expression of misogynist attitudes. More than two and a half thousand years later, it was the Belgian stewardess Defrenne who advocated for the equality of women, this time though in Luxembourg in an act before the Court of Justice, without bloodshed and more successfully. The Court held that Article 119 EEC (now Article 157 TFEU (Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union)), which contained the principle of equal pay for equal work and had been included in the EEC Treaty as a purely economic provision to eliminate distortions of competition, did not only have an economic but also a social aim. As such, it contributed to social progress and the improvement of living and working conditions and it formed ‘part of the foundations of the Community’. Despite the broad, underdeveloped terms of Article 119 EEC, the Court considered the provision directly effective, also against a private party.