A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report printed on Thursday acknowledged that the President of the European Union (EU) Fee, Ursula von der Leyen, missed the EU’s founding ideas and pointers on human rights within the mission letters she wrote to the European commissioners for the brand new mandate of 2024 to 2029.
The report discovered that Ursula von der Leyen’s assertion and objectives for her second time period as president of the European Fee missed human rights as an built-in a part of the EU’s overseas coverage. In each her assertion on the European Parliament and mission letters to the brand new EU commissioners, von der Leyen strictly targeted on implementing the EU’s “short-term pursuits” reminiscent of controlling migration, worldwide transactions, and growing sources without any consideration for respect and implementation of human rights by overseas companions. The report additionally pointed to the criticisms made towards the President of the European Fee’s response to earlier human rights crises and controversial deals signed with third nations, particularly the Memorandum of Understanding with Tunisia.
Ursula von der Leyen has served because the President of the European Fee since 2019 and was reelected in July 2024 for a second time period. In a statement delivered on September 18, she outlined the political pointers that the European Fee will implement over the following 5 years. These pointers embrace deepening the European single market, pursuing the EU’s dedication to the Green Deal and placing ahead a brand new Clear Industrial Deal that may enable EU nations to decarbonize their industries, mobilize personal funding by making a European Financial savings and Investments Union, combating cyber criminality, boosting analysis and innovation in expertise, and constructing new commerce partnerships.
Whereas human rights is a founding precept of the EU and an goal of its overseas coverage, HRW identified that von der Leyen didn’t embrace the European human rights requirements within the political pointers of the Fee for the upcoming 5 years.
In keeping with Article 21 of the EU founding treaty, the EU’s overseas actions should align with its founding ideas which the union additionally seeks to advertise. The founding ideas embrace democracy, the rule of regulation, and the universality and indivisibility of human rights and basic freedoms. The identical article provides that the EU ought to search to develop relations and partnerships with organizations and nations that share the identical ideas. Moreover, the EU created a sequence of human rights guidelines on varied points, starting from kids’s rights in armed conflicts to entry to ingesting water and sanitation.
On the finish of its report, HRW asserted that by overlooking human rights, von der Leyen’s imaginative and prescient for a brand new Europe could be “flawed and counterproductive”. It additionally known as on von der Leyen and the EU commissioners to reintroduce human rights to the rules of the EU’s coverage.
Source / Picture: jurist.org
