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The failure of individual and institutional remedies to ensure the effective enforcement of European Union (EU) law has increasingly focused attention on collective routes to ensuring adherance to EU policies and rights. How comprehensive, however, should collective remedies under EU law be? This introductory article - as well as the other articles of this volume - explores the feasibility of a horizontal approach to the collective enforcement of EU law. While the hope for such an approach has been bolstered by the engagement of the EU institutions, the Commission's most recent 2013 Recommendation fails to significantly advance the development of collective remedies at EU level. The article will conclude by exploring some further, non-legislative, alternatives to furthering the collective enforcement of EU law.
Over the past few decades, European countries have witnessed a proliferation of legal norms concerning marginalised individuals and minorities who increasingly invoke them in front of courts to assert their rights and claim protection. The present volume explores the relationship between law, rights and social mobilisation in Europe. It specifically enquires into the extent and ways in which legal processes and entitlements are mobilised by less privileged social actors to advance their rights claims and pursue social change. Most distinctly, it explores such processes in the context of the multi-level European system, characterised by the existence of multiple legal and judicial arenas at the national, subnational and supranational/transnational level. In such a complex system of law and governance in Europe, concepts like legal opportunity structures, as well as the factors shaping them need to be reconceptualised. How does the multi-level European context distinctly shape the nature and salience of rights, as well as their mobilisation by individuals and minority actors?