Human Rights and Foreign Policy

The preceding chapters examined how the international community collectively addresses human rights and how states interact within multilateral and regional human rights mechanisms and institutions. This chapter and the next look at how states include human rights concerns in their relations with other states. We consider both the ways that human rights concerns interact with other foreign policy goals and the means available to states for acting bilaterally on their international human rights goals. We also consider undesirable unintended consequences of human rights foreign policies and criticisms of states that target other states’ human rights practices.