European Diary: There were red faces in Brussels last week when Human Rights Watch, the non-governmental organisation that dug up evidence on CIA rendition flights throughout Europe, accused the EU of pandering to states that neglect human rights abuses.
Russia, China, the US and Saudi Arabia were all identified as examples of countries that maintain cosy relationships with the EU despite their extremely poor human rights records in Human Rights Watch's 532-page annual report for 2006.
The organisation identified the difficulty the EU has in speaking with a common voice on human rights due to bilateral ties between its members and third countries.
"The EU position on Russia in 2005 made the US defence of human rights seem vigorous," says the report with irony. "Business, energy, and other political interests dominated EU concerns, abetted by an unseemly competition among British prime minister Blair, French prime minister Chirac, and former German chancellor Schröder to proclaim the closeness of their relationship with Russian president Putin."
The report notes that Gerhard Schröder met Vladamir Putin 37 times during the years that he was chancellor.
Top of the German agenda were negotiations for a new gas pipeline from Russia and enlisting Russian support for Germany's bid to get a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Human rights barely got a mention.
The report highlights that the EU failed to sponsor a resolution critical of Russia's record on human rights in Chechnya at the UN Commission on Human Rights.
Yet Schröder, who enjoyed a close personal relationship with Putin, now sits on the board of the consortium that is building the pipeline for Russia's state gas firm, Gazprom.
The European Commission rejects the criticism, signalling that the type of megaphone diplomacy favoured by Human Rights Watch wouldn't achieve the same results on human rights as the quieter, behind the scenes, manoeuvring undertaken by the EU.
"Human rights form a part of all our institutional agreements with partners," says Emma Udwin, a spokeswoman for the EU external relations unit. "It is simply not the case that trade concerns overshadow our commitment to human rights."
She points to an agreement in November 2004 between commission president José Manuel Barroso and Putin to set up a bi-annual consultation meeting on human rights as evidence of some concrete results achieved by the EU through quiet diplomacy.
But European parliamentarians are not convinced.
In a resolution adopted last week, the European Parliament said it remained deeply concerned that the council and commission had failed to address the ongoing serious human rights violations in the Chechen Republic.
It urged both institutions to confront their responsibilities in the face of the most serious human rights issues in the immediate neighbourhood of the EU in the Northern Caucasus region.
The parliament's resolution comes amid renewed concern over the activities of Russian paramilitary groups and security forces and allegations about administrative and judicial harassment of non-government organisations working in Chechnya.
Human rights and democratic principles have been written into EU policies since the implementation of the Treaty on European Union in 1993.
This treaty stipulated that "democracy and the rule of law, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms" is one of the objectives of EU common foreign and security policy.
The Treaty of Amsterdam, which came into force in 1999, integrated human rights into the legal order of the EU.
This treaty inserted "article 6" into the Treaty on European Union, which reaffirmed that the EU "is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles which are common to the member states".
Crucially, it also set out that member states violating the principles in a "serious and persistent" way could see some of their rights deriving from their application of the EU treaty suspended.
But invoking "article 6" from the Amsterdam treaty - or a subsequent article on human rights incorporated into the Nice treaty - is a nuclear option that is untried.
It was considered in 2000 when the far-right Freedom Party joined a coalition government in Austria.
However, in the end EU member states decided to briefly stop co-operating with Austrian officials rather than attempt to suspend their voting rights.
Yet this is exactly the punishment that could be meted out to any member state found to have hosted a secret CIA prison on its territory or knowingly allowed rendition flights through its territory.
Justice commissioner Franco Frattini has already said he would be obliged to propose to the council serious consequences, including the suspension of voting rights, if it were proved that secret prisons existed in EU states.
Human Rights Watch has accused Poland and Romania of hosting the prisons.
Both states reject the allegations and no hard evidence has yet emerged to prove them.
But today the Council of Europe investigator, Swiss senator Dick Marty, will release his first report into the allegations.
If he unearths evidence of secret prisons or torture in any EU state or a candidate country, the political fallout would be significant.
For Romania, evidence of a secret prison on its territory would lead to calls for its bid for EU membership to be delayed. For Poland, a suspension of voting rights would undermine its influence within the EU at a delicate stage of its political development.
It would also turn the spotlight on the EU institutions' commitment to human rights. The commission would have to recommend and propose the sanctions that would apply to any state that contravened article 6 of the Treaty of Amsterdam while the council would have to vote to impose the sanctions.
The prospect for discord and division at both institutions would be considerable, which explains why EU diplomats are hoping Mr Marty's investigations do not cause any more red faces in Brussels.