Human Dignity in Europe: A Foundational Constitutional Principle

Human dignity has become one of the central issues in the international discussion of human rights and constitutionalism. It attracted special attention with the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations and, more recently, scholars have sought to explore human dignity's legal meaning in more theoretical terms, as well as to survey and catalogue its different manifestations across a number of legal systems worldwide. This article contributes to the international debate about human dignity's legal significance by focussing on another dimension, namely the ways in which the concept is understood and used in European constitutionalism, where it has been deployed since the end of World War II and its importance has become undisputed.