On February 21st 2023, the European Studies Centre welcomed Dr Eamonn Noonan (EU Visiting Fellow, St Antony’s College, Oxford) to present the European Parliament’s role in promoting human rights internationally from the 1980s to the present. The presentation was chaired by Dr Hartmut Mayer (St Peter’s College, Oxford).
Using annual reports from the European Parliament, Noonan summarizes elements of continuity and change in the Parliament’s work through the decades. There is an interplay between three categories of human rights: (1) civil and political, (2) economic and social, and (3) solidarity and international cohesion. This division roughly corresponds to the slogan of the French Revolution: liberté, egalité, fraternité. In foreign policy, civil and political rights dominated in the 1980s. True, the European European Community from its foundation was engaged with social rights; the Treaty of Rome, for example, prohibited companies from cutting workers’ wages in certain circumstances. But these policies were not part of foreign policy. It was also true that the Council of Europe placed greater emphasis on political rights than social rights. The European Union ultimately developed its own Charter of Fundamental Rights, in 2000, and this included social rights.
