Human Rights Are Increasingly Important

HOW THE EU HAS USED COMMERCIAL AGREEMENTS TO PROMOTE RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, IN A PAPER BY LEONARDO BORLINI

Progress is an ideal notion, whereas development is a pragmatic fact, yet true progress is not conceivable unless the economic premises needed to realize it are created, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote in the essay Scritti corsari.
 
This quotation opens a paper by Leonardo Borlini on the European Union’s promotion of human rights through preferential trade agreements. “The EU is the perfect laboratory for understanding the tension between development and progress”, he says. In The EU’s Promotion of Human Rights and Sustainable Development through PTAs as a Tool to Influence Business Regulation in Third Countries, professor Borlini discusses the steps that have marked the EU’s action in using trade agreements and development cooperation to promote the respect of human rights, the environment and labour standards.
 
“The Treaty of Lisbon is a milestone. With the introduction of Arts. 3(5) and 21 TEU, the protection and promotion of human rights is established as a foreign policy directive”. However, the inclusion of human rights clauses in bilateral trade agreements dates back to the mid-1990s. Those clauses define the reciprocal obligations of the parties, so that human rights violations of a certain scale by one of them can justify suspension or other counter-measures. Over time, sustainable development obligations and corporate social responsibility clauses have been incorporated to the agreements. This latest initiative makes it all the more evident that the EU wants to influence business activities beyond its borders by promoting market regulation in other countries. “Some claim that projecting the EU model worldwide complies with an ideal of sustainable global development, while others believe that the failure to export its standards would penalize European firms”, Leonardo Borlini notes.

Read more about this topic:
Gianmarco Ottaviano. The Cost of Non-Europe
Electoral Results Explained Through Emotion Theory
The Four Pillars of European Capitalism
Transparency Means Banks Won’t Need to Be Saved
The Robot Vote Has Brought Success for Nationalists
The Importance of Reputation in Public Contract Bids
Finding a Compromise for Tomorrow’s Relations Between UE and UK
Foreign CEOs Get More out of Acquisitions
When It Comes to Fake News, Don’t Imitate the USA
A Common Identity Could Derive from the Protection of Civil Rights
Productivity Cannot Be Balanced with Computers
Europe Should Opt for Qualified Majority Voting on Taxation Issues
My Europe: Seven Bocconi alumni who work for various EU institutions tell us what Europe means to them
 

by Claudio Todesco