Annabel Egan

Contact: annabel.egannuigalway.ie

Qualifications: M.Litt in Management, Economics and Politics (University of St. Andrews, Scotland) B.A in Modern History (Trinity College Dublin)

Annabel Egan was in receipt of a PhD Fellowship at the Irish Centre for Human Rights from 2006-2007. In October 2007 she took up an IRCHSS postgraduate scholarship.

Prior to commencing her doctoral research at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, Annabel lived and worked in China for five years, primarily as a media analyst and journalist with the South China Morning Post and most recently as spokesperson for the European Commission Delegation to China and Mongolia.

EU Human Rights Policy in Action: The China Case

Since the 1990s, debate concerning the effectiveness of the European Union (EU) as a promoter of human rights has focused on what has been described as the ’bifurcation’ of EU human rights policy along an internal/external fault line, and has sought to highlight an apparent double standard evident in a human rights policy that is said to be primarily outward looking. Critical analysis of the EU’s external human rights policy is confined to an examination of two areas: EU accession policy and EU development policy, in particular in relation to African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. However, the existing literature does not examine the manner in which the EU conducts itself on the fundamental issue of human rights in what has become one of its most important and controversial relationships in the 21st Century, that with China. Given China’s notoriously poor human rights record and its status as the EU’s second largest trading partner this prima facie appears to be a major gap in our understanding of the EU as a human rights actor.

Examination of the development and execution of EU human rights policy on China since the 1985 Agreement on Trade and Economic Co-operation, which forms the current legal basis for EU-China bilateral relations, came into force will show that contrary to the ’bifurcation’ hypothesis, EU human rights policy on China is purely context driven.

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