The ongoing negotiations on accession of the European Union to the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR” or “Convention”) prove to be a difficult task for the negotiators. Since the accession involves the unusual occurrence of a supranational organization signing up to a sophisticated system of human rights protection, this does not come as a surprise. Apart from the political difficulties of obtaining the consent of forty-seven signatories to the Convention and of the EU’s institutions and Member States, the requirements of two very different legal orders need to be brought in line. From the point of view of European Union law, the most prominent obstacle to an integration of the EU into the external supervision mechanism of the Convention is the autonomy of the EU legal order. From the very start of the negotiations it has been clear that that autonomy, which is jealously policed by the Court of Justice of the European Union, would be a major issue for the negotiators. This contribution is therefore dedicated to the intricacies which the negotiators, and potentially the ECJ, face in this respect. It refers to the different versions of a draft agreement published by the informal working group on accession.1 It contains a critical analysis of the draft with regard to the autonomy of the EU’s legal order but also makes more general comments on whether the proposed solutions would be workable.