Sudeshna Basu

Analysing the Position of the European Union in the United Nations System: Analytical Framework

Chapter 1 underscored the growing importance of the EU’s engagement in global multilateral fora under the UN umbrella. This tendency, emblematically reflected in the two influential EU policy documents of 2003 – the Commission communication on ‘The EU and the UN: partners in effective multilateralism’ and the European Security Strategy (European Commission, 2003; European Council, 2003) – sparked substantive research interest in the topic. Where the EU’s participation in UN fora had been predominantly examined by legal scholars before (BrA¼ckner, 1990), analysts of EU foreign policy began to turn to the subject from the early 2000s onwards (Jorgensen, 2007, p. 509).

The European Union in the Human Rights Council

The European Union (EU) has for years placed human rights at the centre of its internal and external policies. It has proclaimed that the EU itself is ‘based upon and defined by its attachment to the principles of liberty, democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rule of law’ (EU Annual Human Rights Report, 2007, p. 9) and that as a global player it has a ‘global responsibility to protect and promote human rights’ (EU Annual Human Rights Report, 2007, p. 9). The Union continues to be strongly committed to promoting and upholding human rights internally and beyond its borders and has demonstrated this through its utilization of instruments such as the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR). 1 It moreover continues to be dedicated to promoting not only human rights cooperation, but also better ways to address and respond to dire human rights situations around the world (EU Guidelines on Human Rights Dialogues, December 2001, Article 4).

The European Union’ Participation in United Nations Human Rights and Environmental Governance: Key Concepts and Major Challenges

Within the span of a few decades, the European Union (EU or Union) has made a remarkable ascent as a global player, evolving from a comparatively marginal actor in world affairs to a resourceful and widely recognized foreign policy force in its own right. This has been most recently reaffirmed with the adoption of United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 65/276 on 3 May 2011 entitled ‘Strengthening of the United Nations System: Participation of the European Union in the work of the UN’, which granted the EU further rights, such as the right to speak and right of reply, in the UNGA. The adoption of this resolution, with 180 states in favour, demonstrated the UNGA’s formal recognition of the institutional changes in the EU brought about by the Lisbon Treaty and, more generally, the evolving nature of the global body (for a discussion of these changes see Chapter 13).

The Position(s) of the EU in the UN System: The Examples of Human Rights and Environmental Governance

This edited volume set out to explore the position(s) of the European Union (EU or Union) in multilateral global governance arrangements under the UN umbrella in two central domains of EU foreign policy activity: human rights and the environment. In so doing, it parted from several assumptions about (i) the EU’s participation in governance fora in these domains and (ii) its reflection in the academic literature.