A. STRUCTURE OF THE TOOLKITS These Toolkits are designed to help you understand how the Directives fit into your practice as a criminal practitioner, in particular vis-à-vis the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’). In this Toolkit we will refer to different kinds of law and will distinguish them like this: Provisions of the ECHR and citations from case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECtHR’) appear in yellow shading, with a single border, to represent their nature as an irreducible minimum. They are presented in italics. Provisions of European Union law or citations from the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (‘CJEU’) appear in green shading, with a double border, to represent their nature as complementary, possibly more extensive protection. Suggestions by Fair Trials on using the Directive in practice appear in blue shading, with a triple border, to represent your use of the Directives in the local legal context. We have indicated when we are making a suggestion with the symbol ‘’. In general, the Toolkits are constructed by reviewing the existing ECHR principles (with reference to cases of the ECtHR), presenting the provisions of the relevant Directive with some initial views as to their meaning, and then providing advice on how to use the Directives in practice. The last point – effectively, ‘using’ EU law in court – depends upon certain assumptions about the legal effects of the Directives and how they can be invoked in national courts. The purpose of this Toolkit is to propose our approach to this question of how the Directives take effect in national law. B. INVOKING EU LAW: GENERAL PRINCIPLES It is not possible to give a complete overview of EU law in this Toolkit. However, since criminal lawyers may have had very little reason to study any of these principles since law school, we propose to run through the essential principles as a starting point for further research. 3. Direct effect – in general EU law works through a system of ‘decentralised’ enforcement where the national court is the primary driver of compliance. This system has been the modus operandi of EU law ever since the seminal judgment Van Gend en Loos,6 in which the European Court of Justice (now the CJEU) established the principle of ‘direct effect’. The philosophy is that when obligations upon Member States are there to provide rights to individuals, the best way of ensuring compliance is to give the individual the ability to invoke the right directly. The principle was originally recognised for primary law (Treaties) when the obligation in question was ‘precise, clear and unconditional’ and ‘do not call for additional measures’ by Member States or the EU. It was then extended to regulations (not relevant here), and then to directives. 6 Case 26/62 NV Algemene Transport- en Expeditie Onderneming van Gend & Loos v Netherlands Inland Revenue Administration ECLI:EU:C:1963:1. 4