This panel considers the challenges facing the EU in promoting and protecting human rights in an era of authoritarian pushback against the global human rights regime.

The promotion of human rights is one of the main self-assigned objectives of the EU. However, the EU’s inconsistent promotion of human rights across countries and its uneven approach to different types of human rights violations has long been criticized by scholars. The paper approaches these inconsistencies from a social psychology perspective and seeks to understand the role of “emotion culture”, i.e. ideas about how people/entities ought to feel in a given situation, in determining the EU’s conception, framing and reaction to human rights violations. In particular, the paper draws on Hoshschild’s concept of feeling rules and investigates how individual EU actors feel and experience in the cases of human rights violations and whether there is a shared emotion culture of human rights at the EU level. The paper does so by comparing the (emotional) discourse of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) when they address human rights violations in an autocratic non-EU country (Turkey) and in an EU member state (Hungary). It seeks to answer: (1) how (through what discursive strategies) the MEPs criticize human rights violations in different contexts (insider/EU member vs outsider/non-EU country)?; (2) how far nationality and ideology play a role in the MEPs’ stance in defending human rights internally and externally. The data come from the frame analysis of the MEPs’ addresses in the plenary debates during the 8th legislative term of the European Parliament (2014-2019) when human rights violations peaked in both countries under study.

This paper will explore the challenges faced by the European Union (EU) in seeking to promote human rights in its relationship with China. Since the 1990s China has become a major trading partner and a political ‘strategic partner’ of the EU. In this context, the EU attempted to promote human rights within China by a combination of constructive engagement, technical assistance and quiet diplomacy. In the 1990s and 2000s this took place against the background of the apparent primacy of the liberal international order and partial political liberalization within China. Since the late 2000s the context for EU human rights policy towards China has become more problematic, with China (and others) challenging the liberal international order and becoming more authoritarian internally. The EU’s human rights engagement policies towards China have increasingly broken down or been discredited. The EU has begun to employ sanctions against China over human rights issues - albeit, on a limited scale. At the same time, Chinese authoritarianism has become externalised, posing human rights challenges within EU member states. The Chinese case starkly illustrates the limitations of the policies available to the EU in seeking to promote human rights in authoritarian states, as well as new challenges posed by the global power of authoritarian states. EU human rights policies towards China is entering a new era of realism, but exactly what that means – or should mean – is unclear.

Over the past few years, autocratic states including China and Russia have become much more active in UN human rights fora, contesting existing norms and trying to shape new ones more to their liking. This paper investigates how the EU is navigating the more contentious context of the international politics of human rights. It focuses on how the EU has responded to proposals on gender issues put forward by autocratic states in the Human Rights Council and General Assembly’s Third Committee. It addresses two questions: 1) what are the EU’s positions on gender issues in these debates and how united are the member states? 2) how is the EU engaging diplomatically with other states on gender issues? The paper assesses the EU’s effectiveness in the contentious politics of human rights at the UN, considering the extent to which internal unity is a necessary condition for effectiveness, and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of its outreach. It also considers the effect that lowest-common-denominator positions reached within the EU may have in leading some member states to cooperate more extensively with others outside the EU framework to push for stronger positions on gender. The paper demonstrates that the EU faces challenges in confronting authoritarian pushback against human rights, and that it could try to build new coalitions and adjust its message to strengthen its defence of the international human rights regime.