The political dynamics of EU human rights law: scratching beneath the surface

EU human rights, as a policy and legal field, is characterised by overlapping and competing regimes, involving complex interactions.As a scholarly field, it is dominated by legal scholars, which results in most works focusing on substantive and institutional developments at EU level and a neglect of the more bottom-up dynamics and the domestic factors, actors and contexts that influence its evolution and application.This chapter provides an overview of EU human rights law and critically reviews the main strands of scholarship which have explored its many facets, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.It calls for greater interdisciplinary engagement in the study of EU human rights and argues that European integration theories and socio-legal works on legal mobilisation, and in particular the concept of legal opportunities, offer useful analytical devices to better understand the development of EU human rights law.The need for more systematic investigations of the root dynamics of engagement with EU human rights instruments and mechanisms, such as the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, as well as procedures and remedies involving EU institutions, has become even more salient with the recent rule-of-law crises in Hungary and Poland.Attempts to address those challenges may have far-reaching implications for the future of EU human rights law, and European integration more generally.