Page 148 - El État de los derechos humanos en el desarrollo sostenible

EL ETAT DE LOS DERECHOS HUMANOS EN EL DESARROLLO SOSTENIBLE

Towards a new European Trade and Human Rights Policy

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Gerhard Niedrist*

The European Union is world leader in the linkage between human rights protection and

international trade and development treaty relations. Since 1992, the European Union

requires human rights clauses to be included in all its external preferential agreements. Often

the scope, terms and definitions of these clauses are the most difficult parts in the
negotiation for new trade and preferential agreements. Hence, the promotion and

monitoring of human rights is therefore a central element in the European Union´s external

trade and development policy. The human rights clauses combine two different ways of
operation.

The negative elements allow the European to immediately suspend trade concessions with

third countries. This reflects the primarily idea of the human rights clauses, which was to

provide the EU with an effective, fast and legally secure way in cases of severe human rights
violations like in Uganda, Yugoslavia and Haiti in the late seventies, eighties and early

nineties. So far, suspensions, as negative component of the human rights clauses, have been

applied mostly in cases of coup-d’états, electoral frauds or severe and systematical violations

of civil and political human rights and nearly exclusively against African and other
development countries of the ACP-cooperation.

* Dr. Gerhard Niedrist, Research-professor, School for Government and Social Sciences, Department of Law,
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Monterrey. gerhard.niedrist@itesm.mx.

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