No. 9/10 –The Road Not Taken: The EU as a Global Human Rights Actor

Title: The Road Not Taken: The EU as a Global Human Rights Actor

Abstract: This paper challenges the traditional account of the EU’s engagement with human rights. The classic narrative begins with the silence of the EEC Treaty in 1957 and depicts a gradual engagement with human rights over the decades, culminating in the establishment of a substantial EU human rights regime in recent years. The paper returns to the EU’s origins in the 1950s and compares the ambitious but long-forgotten plans for European Community engagement with human rights drafted then with today’s EU human rights framework. It argues that today’s EU human rights system is less ambitious than that envisaged in the 1950s, and that the two main causes for criticism of today’s EU system –the lack of a serious human rights mechanism, and the double-standard between internal and external human rights policies – have survived the changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty and even been enshrined by those changes.

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