International law subjectivity of the European Union

Abstract

The paper focuses on selected aspects of international law subjectivity of the European Union. While international law subjectivity itself is today taken as a fact, its formation is still linked to a number of questions. In the light of the above, in the first part of the paper, the author addresses the question of when the EU was granted international law subjectivity. It was really only with the Treaty of Lisbon, or maybe we could talk about the international law subjectivity of the EU law earlier. Here, the paper is based on analysis inextricably linked with historical research. The ambition is to verify the hypothesis of the existence of the EU’s international law subjectivity even in the pre-Lisbon period. Subsequently, the second part of the paper deals with the issue of the scope of the EU’s international law subjectivity. In this part, the paper focuses on the examination of rules of the EU law, but also rules of international law. Stress is laid on analysis accompanied by comparison. The aim is to verify whether the scope of the international law subjectivity of the EU includes the so-called standard components of the international law subjectivity of an international organization as they have been identified by the theory of international law.