Recent Perspectives on the Application of Minimum Standards for the Protection of Social Rights in the European Union

This paper focuses on the analysis of workers' social rights from the perspective of compliance with the minimum standards of protection ensured at EU level. The key values respected by the European Union are: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and not least human rights. With this central concern at its heart, the Union has sought to adopt, including at the normative level, a flagship document which, at the same time, represents a minimum set of human rights protection standards. Among these, the paper highlights social rights, which are expressly enshrined in the Charter, and traces the current evolution of this category of rights, analyzing the 2024 Commission Report on the Charter, in the framework of the Stategy for strengthening the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, as well as the opinion of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, which has become a trusted body providing comparative data and analysis on fundamental rights to support the work of the EU institutions and Member States. The paper also points out that the fundamental document has led to the adoption of new EU legislation that expressly protects certain fundamental rights such as data protection, gender equality and, more recently, rights deriving from the use of artificial intelligence, but this protection is not self-evident, as new challenges have emerged in recent years, for example in the areas of migration, health or security.