Human Rights as an Horizontal Issue in EU External Policy

Outline

Generally speaking, Human Rights should underpin EU external action in every field and especially in sectors so closely linked to Human Rights such as migration, development and security. However, beyond rhetoric, a coherent, solid and compact approach is still to find. The research aims to analyze how the Human Rights argument is used nowadays in the EU external discourse in view to assess the possibility to elaborate a type of Human Rights Compact which should inspire the EU external policy in the international arena.

The research is organized in different steps:

1. analysis of the use of Human Rights discourse in the external policy of the EU, especially in the field of migration, security, development, taking into consideration different documents such as press releases, agreements, EU institutions reports;
2. meetings and conferences with EU agents, especially working in the EU External Service in the fields above mentioned, in view to assess their approach to Human Rights issues as part of larger dossiers;

final event exposing the result of the research.

Researcher in charge

Marco Balboni