A INTRODUCTION

Chapter 4 focused on the means available for enforcement of the obligations taken on by states on ratification of the Charter. On the one hand, there is the possibility of enforcement by domestic courts whose availability depends, from state to state, on the legal status of the Charter in the particular state and on the competence of domestic courts to handle Charter issues. And there is only a scant record of such activity in courts in practice. On the other hand, there is the system of routine monitoring of state compliance by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities.

Central to both enforcement models is the question of how to interpret and apply the text of the Charter, whether at the hand of national courts or of the Congress monitoring procedures. On the face of it, these processes of interpretation and application are the same sort of activities that one encounters in constitutional or human rights review, and the ways in which such principles may be applied to Charter practice are considered in Section B, with a particular focus on the problems involved. In Section C, however, it is argued that, while those interpretative principles may, indeed, be relevant to Charter application by national courts, they have been largely irrelevant to the Congress monitoring process. The reasons for this and then the consequences for Congress monitoring are explained.

B CHARTER INTERPRETATION

When we say that the systematic monitoring of the states’ performance under the Charter is, on the face of it, the same sort of activity that one encounters with other forms of treaty-based (or indeed constitutional) review, we mean that it is the familiar process of matching state law and practice against the terms of the Charter to establish whether the prescribed standard is being maintained. A court has simply to determine whether the law which has been enacted or the action taken complies with the ‘higher law’ restrictions laid down. But it is not, of course, ‘simple’. Questions of interpretation are necessarily involved and, therefore, questions about how the inevitable linguistic ambiguities in human language are to be resolved. In the case of the Charter, two considerations combine to produce, in its substantive provisions, language which, at key points, is difficult to interpret and apply.