Conference Agenda

European values' characteristics put them at the core of the European integration process, meaning that the member-states should accept and respect them. However, the polycrises era has brought European values' role under question, as more often, the member-states define values' content according to their interests, or, worst, they present their disdain against them.
After various crises that disrupted the EU's function, geopolitical crises present new challenges for the Union. Two of the most significant at this moment are the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Both episodes question the EU's role in the region and a world where transformations have accelerated. Whilst the Russian invasion is part of a broader redefinition of the EU's relation with Russia, the conflict in Gaza questions more profound ideas and memories: anti-semitism and anti-Islamism.
Considering the significance of observing how and when these two definitions appear in the MEP's work, I focus on the European Parliament's parliamentary debates, covering the last parliamentary session (between 2019 and 2024). As it is difficult to research all the member states, I decreased my sample to cover Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Greek MEPs. After applying constructivist grounded theory, my results will be coded, categorised, analysed, and visualised with MAXQDA.

Long before the United Kingdom left the UK, the question of European rights was a bone of contention between political parties. The far-right party UKIP, as well as the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party, deliberately conflated the two major European Courts that deal with rights issues, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union, in order to discredit their work. This rhetorical approach maintains a misleading view of what exactly EU-derived rights are on the domestic level. This contributed to a successful construction of human rights as a whole as a negative enterprise nationally and a good enough reason to leave the EU, for instance as far as immigration legislation is concerned.

However, for all the negative rhetoric, EU-derived rights are still firmly entrenched in the UK legal system, for instance in the realm of anti-discrimination legislation. Furthermore, the partial incorporation of the ECHR in UK law through the Human Rights Act has contributed to changing the mechanisms of legal thinking in the UK in a durable manner. Despite Brexit, therefore, the effects of European rights, whether EU-based or coming from the Council of Europe, are still tangible in the UK.

My study will be based on discourse analysis of political speeches from two main sources:

- Party manifestos, both for national general elections and for European Parliament elections.

- Hansard records of parliamentary proceedings for debates about national human rights legislation and leaving the EU.

This paper will try to show the contradictions of a rhetorical discourse of rejection of EU-based human rights which deliberately obscures the very real contributions of Europe, as a whole, to the British legal system. I will demonstrate how the frames used on this topic by UKIP or the right wing of the Conservative Party are based on conflation and incorrect identification of rights, rather than substantive legal policies, allowing the European rights system to remain influential in the UK.