Introduction

This chapter provides an introduction to the work of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), and points out the centrality of research for the assessment of the respect, protection and fulfilment of fundamental rights, as well as the importance of such evidence-based assessment for informing policy. The account presented below provides a snapshot of the location and operation of the FRA within the political and organisational structure of the European Union's (EU) internal human rights politics and practice. The aim of the FRA to provide objective, reliable and comparable data to assist EU institutions and member states in developing evidence-based policies on fundamental rights issues requires that it has both a means of remaining sensitive to those issues which are salient in current policy debates, and that it has a wider reach beyond the policy milieu in order to identify those issues that are currently below the horizon of political concern, but which should be given urgent attention. Research is thus central to the fulfilment of the FRA's mandate, and this places demands on the organisation to ensure that its research work is credible and policy-relevant, and to establish networks of communication that will enable the results of its work to reach the attention of those who shape policies, and those who devise the means of implementing them, at both EU and national level.

Background to the establishment of the FRA

On 15 February 2007 the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission, 30 years after they signed a joint declaration in Luxembourg to do their utmost to protect the fundamental rights enshrined in the constitutions of the member states and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) ‘[…] in the exercise of powers and in pursuance of the aims of the European Communities’ (OJEC, 1977), created the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Its prime objective would be to provide the ‘[…] institutions, bodies, offices and agencies of the Community and its Member States, when implementing Community law, with assistance and expertise relating to fundamental rights in order to support them when they take measures or formulate courses of action within their respective spheres of competence to fully respect fundamental rights.’