ABSTRACT
The chapter provides an overview of issues related to human rights protection in three major EU Mediterranean countries. I begin with general remarks on factors that make human rights in this area specific. ‘The Great Sea’ offers a marine passage between countries of the basin, but often at a price of dangerous journeys. The region is traversed by significant cultural and religious differences, exacerbated by their physical proximity. Moreover, the European Mediterranean is nowadays enmeshed in patterns of hegemony, which turn it into borderlands – a scene where the ‘European identity’ is carved out and defended against migration pressure. Then I pass to scrutinising two dimensions of human rights protection in the Mediterranean. As far as the internal dimension is concerned, I provide an overview of violation patterns based on the examples of three EU Mediterranean countries, Italy, Spain and Greece. Analysing the external dimension, I focus on how the EU and its Mediterranean member states manage migration and how their actions have infringed human rights. In conclusion, I revisit patterns of human rights violations in the Mediterranean in order to put them in political, cultural and historical contexts of the region.
