07. Working Papers

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This collection includes high-quality, informal series and other mixed content collections (typically of article-length items). These are often works in progress disseminated for discussion purposes and some of these papers have not been peer reviewed externally.

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Browsing 07. Working Papers by Subject "human rights"
  • Item
    Applying rights based approach (RBA) to development within the EU development cooperation : reality or rhetoric? A case study of Nepal
    (Global Campus, 2017) Bhandari, Shiva Datta
    Ensuring full respect of human rights is one of the key features of the EU development cooperation. It is expressed either as a targeted human rights programme/project or as a cross cutting aspect of the development cooperation. In 2012 the EU adopted Rights-Based Approach to Development (RBAD) that all institutions including the EU Delegations are obliged to apply in each process of the development cooperation. As there has not been any review done by the EU, this paper assesses the EU policies, approaches and institutional readiness for the RBAD application from two aspects. First, the political rationale of the RBAD in development cooperation and their reflection in binding EU documents; and second, application of those binding provisions and the underlying challenges in terms of their full application. More specifically, the paper focuses on the RBAD as a new approach to the EU Development Cooperation and the situation or the potentiality of their application within the EU Delegations. The EU Toolbox developed in April 2014 (Commission staff working document, which aims at integrating human rights principles into EU operational activities for development) is referred to in detail to assess the full application of the RBAD in EU development cooperation. The political preference of this fairly new approach of the EU development policy expects a synchronisation of the human rights principles and norms in all development cooperation activities both at the HQs and in the field. However, this paper concludes that the application of the RBAD is not yet the case in each process of the EU development cooperation, which is largely due to the intra-institutional and external challenges. This paper briefly presents the major challenges identified and the potential measures required for full application of the RBAD principles within EU development cooperation.
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    Tackling coherence and consistency in the EU's external human rights policy
    (Global Campus, 2017) Taufar, Patrik
    The current discourse in the field of the external human rights policy of the European Union (EU) is strongly oriented toward the so-called “challenge of (in)coherence” . This is visible in academic as well as in policy-making outputs. In this context, the largest academic project on the EU and Human Rights of the past years, the FP7 Frame project aiming at ´Fostering Human Rights among EU (internal and external) policies´, identified coherence as one of three major cross-cutting challenges for the fulfilment of the EU´s strong commitment to compliance with, and promotion of human rights standards. It is remarkable that the challenge of (in)coherence has been identified primarily as the result of technical obstacles at the side of the EU´s institutional system. Firstly, incoherence occurs because “institutional structures and mandates in the EU are notoriously complicated and do not allow for efficient coordination.” The second reason for the incoherence of the EU’s human rights policy is supposedly the fact that “frames of reference in different policy fields are also different, and do not all align with the human rights agenda with the same intensity.” Finally, the third, non-technical, but political and strategic reason may be that “the Union´s many competences result in its obligation to cater to different interests, some of which may consider human rights to be a hindrance.”