Human rights in the European Neighbourhood Policy

This chapter provides an overview of human rights in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), examining their role in theory and their operationalisation in practice, while tying these to evolving European Union (EU) conceptions of the role human rights play in foreign policy. It presents the first years of the ENP roughly up to the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, which highlights how and through which tools human rights were included in the ENP. The chapter examines the changes introduced to human rights promotion in the ENP following the 2011 events, which shook the neighbourhood, those introduced in the EU's global human rights policy, which are of consequence to the ENP. It explains the travails of pursuing human rights in a changing and troubled landscape, highlighting the discrepancies that have regularly emerged between intentions and practice, and the normative dilemmas and foreign policy problems behind these gaps.