Bringing Human Rights in the Enlargement Politics: the EU as a Human Rights Promoter in the Central Eastern Europe

Magdalena Agnieszka Zolkos

Bringing Human Rights in the Enlargement Politics: the EU as a Human Rights Promoter in the Central Eastern Europe

Roč.6,č.2–3(2004)

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Recently, there has been a spate of interest in the developments of human rights policy of the European Union in the context of its Eastern enlargement. Inclusion of human rights issues in the political conditionality for the enlargement in the so-called Copenhagen Criteria was accompanied by the strong interest on the side of the EU in human rights problems in the post-communist countries. The developments signified possible emergence of the 'new human rights approach' of the EU, which would be characterized by (i) a high degree of 'conditionality', and (ii) the proliferation and complexity of requirements. This article studies the transformative effect of international norms on the domestic structures in the context of the fifth enlargement of the EU. As an analytical tool, it introduces the concept of 'post-communism' and tries to define what the post-communist context of human rights means. The aim of this article is thus to contextualize the compound issue of human rights within the wider framework of the post-communist transformational order, and, subsequently, to investigate the suitability of the EU 'new human rights approach' when addressing these problems. Through the juxtaposition of how human rights issues were tackled in EU’s Regular Reports on Poland ad on Estonia, this article puts forth a tentative hypothesis that the EU has become a powerful and ambitious, but continuously rather ambivalent human rights actor in Central Eastern Europe.

Klíčová slova:
EU Human Rights Regime; Eastern Enlargement; Copenhagen Criteria; Conditionality; Post-communism; Norm-socialization;

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