The European Union has come very far from its original inception as a purely economic community. Today its competences expand beyond common market logic; it is a new legal order of international law that guarantees rights not only to economic entities, but also to European citizens.

In the case C-390/12 P Pfleger [2014] the Court of Justice noted that both the traditional internal market law proportionality assessment and the proportionality test under Art 52(1) of the Charter would lead to the same judicial outcome. This indicates that in the situations where fundamental freedoms and fundamental rights go hand-in-hand, the Charter-like proportionality can impact the Court‘s reasoning in its proportionality analysis. Could this be a change in judicial attitude, embracing a new, fundamental-rights-based, principle of proportionality? Or does the Court, by mentioning Art 52(1) CFR en passe, hide behind cowardly language, avoiding to engage with fundamental rights analysis in more moral/substantive terms? Do the different contexts of the various EU policy areas change the way a proportionality test is constructed? If so, why should the principle of proportionality function differently in different EU law contexts when the Charter applies in a uniform way?

In light of the above, this panel will examine the new landscape of EU constitutionalism and will question the quality of resilience of the traditional market-law-based proportionality principle in EU law and its suitability of balancing fundamental rights. The papers will explore proportionality in the areas of EU citizenship, internal market, EU criminal and EU intellectual property law.