This organisational meeting, held in Rome (Italy), aims at discussing the preliminary stages of the research project, including issues such as: drafting of a questionnaire, which will be used to collect country-specific information, commissioning a few pilot reports by national experts and planning future meetings, including a kick off meeting that will be held in Turin (Italy) in September 2018.

The Common Constitutional Traditions in Europe project seeks to identify the source of these traditions; their content; their relationship with national identity; whether they are an autonomous source of European law and the way in which they emerge as common to Member States and are expressed as such.

The project will go beyond the existing ECtHR’s acquis on the subject, and will explore the idea that – eg under the EU’s general principles, or under the principles highlighted in the two Venice Commission documents on the rule of law – there arguably exist European if not even global values that have broader implications than those presently affirmed by the jurisprudence of the European courts.