A INTRODUCTION

At the drafting stage, many of the terms of the Charter were deliberately cast in language which was both general and rather vague. We have also seen that states were given a generous latitude in the degree to which they signed up to the Charter's obligations. Subject to these qualifications, however, it was intended that the Charter should be treated as imposing real and binding obligations on ratifying states. It was no mere declaration of intent; no mere symbol of the ratifying states’ democratic aspirations. The Charter was to be a serious, treaty-based and legally binding guarantee of the autonomy rights that it proclaimed for local authorities, and the expectation was that the principal means whereby those guarantees might be enforced would be through the Council of Europe's own monitoring of the application of the Charter and the collective pressure of the Council's members which could be brought to bear. Those monitoring procedures and, in particular, the lead role of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities in them are discussed below in Section D below. Section E contains a note on a selection of recent monitoring recommendations as well as on the two United Kingdom monitoring recommendations issued so far.

Another possibility, however, was that the Charter might become enforceable (on the initiative of local authorities themselves or otherwise) in the domestic courts of the countries to which it applied. There is no direct parallel between the Charter and, for instance, the European Convention on Human Rights or the Treaty on European Union (and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union) but those regimes have, in their different ways, produced rights and obligations which are now to be regarded as, first and foremost, enforceable in the domestic courts of the member states. The extent to which that might also be the case, even if to only a more limited degree, in relation to the Charter should also be examined.