Fundamental Freedoms, Fundamental Rights, and the Scope of Free Movement Law

The relation between internal market freedoms (the so-called “fundamental freedoms ”) and fundamental rights is a recurring question in EU law. In recent years, after rulings such as Schmidberger, Omega, Viking , and Laval , attempts to provide a framework for approaching and resolving clashes between fundamental freedoms and fundamental rights have acquired a special urgency. Less attention, however, has been devoted to capturing the different nature of fundamental freedoms and fundamental rights, and to evaluating the implications of the choice whether or not to include fundamental freedoms in the same category as fundamental rights. The dominant focus in the literature is on what happens when free movement and fundamental rights pull in different directions. Yet, the question of whether fundamental freedoms should be regarded as fundamental rights also deserves close scrutiny. It is especially important to understand the implications of this classification since the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights appears to treat some, but not all, fundamental freedoms as fundamental rights. In particular, the Charter seems to regard the free movement of persons and services as fundamental rights, but not the free movement of goods or the free movement of capital. A similar approach is exhibited in the case law: While the Court recognizes the fundamental rights character of free movement of persons, it does not appear to extend that characterization to the entirety of free movement law. This article attempts to make sense of this dichotomy by relying on an account of fundamental rights that adopts a non-instrumental focus on the right-holder. It argues that certain free movement provisions, namely the free movement of goods and capital, cannot be characterized as fundamental rights because they are inherently instrumental—they are a means to the internal market end. By contrast, the other free movement provisions appear to match the account of fundamental rights adopted here. As this article aims to show, the classification of certain, or all, fundamental freedoms as fundamental rights is a question that affects the interpretation of the scope of the free movement provisions. Moreover, as will be seen, the question is closely related to the debate on the convergence between the free movement provisions, and on the persistence of the “wholly internal rule,” the rule that requires a cross-border connection to trigger the application of free movement law.

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