Human rights concepts in EU Human Rights Dialogues
In: https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/346324
This report presents five case studies on EU Human Rights Dialogues (HRDs). The case studies concern the HRDs with the African Union, China, India, Morocco and Peru. Building on the findings of the previous reports in Work Package 3 of the FRAME project, the aim of this report is to explore how domestic and organisation-based conceptions of human rights, democracy and rule of law emerge in HRDs and what consequences these conceptions entails for the HRDs' goals. The report starts with a description of the methodology used (Chapter II). Next, Chapter III puts HRDs in context by examining their institutional setting. The Chapter specifically focuses on three key issues: respect for sovereignty and the equality of participants; transparency; and the priorities of the dialogues. Chapter IV is dedicated to the case studies. The Chapter is divided in two parts: the first part focuses on General Human Rights Dialogues and the second on Formal Human Rights Dialogues. General HRD's are Dialogues of a general nature based on regional or bilateral treaties, agreements or conventions or strategic partnerships dealing systematically with the issue of human rights. The first case study in this category concerns India. This is an elaborate study. It fills a gap in the scholarly literature since the EUIndia HRD has so far been little researched. One of the main difficulties that the case study highlights with the HRD is that the EU is conditioned by an essentially Eurocentric world-view about India. The next case study in this first part of the Chapter concerns Peru. The research shows that although the EU's conceptions of human rights differ in some respects from the Peruvian, the Dialogue has been productive. The last case study in the part of General HRD's concerns European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), more specifically Morocco. This too is an elaborate case study which presents a much-needed addition to the academic literature. It details the institutional setting of the dialogue and describes to what extent diverging ...