AnNABEL EGAN

Contact: annabel.egannuigalway.ie

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

Research focus: EU human rights policy on China

Annabel Egan was in receipt of a Ph.D Fellowship at the Irish Centre for Human Rights from 2006-2007 and an IRCHSS postgraduate scholarship from 2007-2009. After a two year leave of absence from her studies following the birth of her second child in 2009, Annabel is now in the process of writing up her thesis which is due for submission in September 2012. In addition to completing her doctorate, Annabel is currently working as Research Associate with the EU-China Human Rights Network at the Irish Centre for Human Rights. 

Annabel’s interest in China has been the focus of both her professional development and independent research for the past decade, including a five year period living and working in Beijing as a freelance journalist, an editor with the Beijing bureau of the South China Morning Post and as spokesperson for the European Commission Delegation to China. Prior to living in China she worked as a broadcast journalist with RTE from 1997-2000.

Justification and Legitimacy: EU Human Rights Policy on China

Since the 1990s, debate concerning the performance 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 largely confined to an examination of inconsistencies between EU rhetoric and action with a focus on two areas: accession policy and development policy. However, the existing literature does not provide an in-depth examination of 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.

To better understand the choices made by the EU as a human rights actor in China, rather than dismiss official EU discourse on human rights as empty rhetoric, it is necessary to analyse the content and coherence of the arguments presented by the EU institutions with competence for external human rights policy to explain and defend the choices they have made.  The key issue at stake is not whether or not EU human rights policy is applied equally at all times across all circumstances but how the EU has justified its policy decisions and whether the arguments themselves are coherent. The necessity of such analysis becomes even more acutely evident given the central role occupied by the process of justification in achieving legitimacy as it is understood in the social sciences.

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