Main

Daniela Sicurelli

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the Lisbon Treaty on the harmonization of the actions concerning the foreign relations of the European Union (EU), with a focus on trade and human rights policies. It argues that an alliance of NGOs and economic interest groups promoting a human rights approach to external trade has found in the strengthened European Parliament an institutional channel for their demands. However, the creation of the European external action service as the EU’s diplomatic body and the separation of the negotiation tables concerning trade and human right have ultimately reduced the influence on European trade policy of both the European Parliament and stakeholders interested in human rights promotion. On the basis of the case study of the negotiations with Vietnam, this paper contributes to the literature on the EU as promoter of human rights through bilateral trade by discussing the internal constraints on its normative power.

Details

Article Keywords

European Union, Lisbon Treaty, Human Rights, Trade, NGOs

Section
Research Articles
Article Copyright
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Material published in the JCER is done so under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with copyright remaining with the author.
  • Articles published online in the JCER cannot be published in another journal without explicit approval of the JCER editor.
  • Authors can 'self-archive' their articles in digital form on their personal homepages, funder repositories or their institutions' archives provided that they link back to the original source on the JCER website. Authors can archive pre-print, post-print or the publisher's version of their work.
  • Authors agree that submitted articles to the JCER will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the JCER.
Further information about archiving and copyright are contained within the JCER Open Access Policy.