A panel of major European figures, including the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Mrs Mary Robinson, will today call for a radical shake-up in the EU's human rights policy.
The "eminent person's group" will call on the EU to establish its own human rights office and monitoring agency and to appoint a single commissioner with responsibility for human rights. It will also call for the publication of an annual comprehensive EU review of human rights.
The appeal will be published today in Vienna, with a report from the Academy of European Law in the European University Institute in Florence, which criticises the Union's policy as "incoherent", "ambivalent", and effectively "in disarray". The report and meetings of the group were funded by the European Commission.
The eminent persons group includes Mrs Robinson; Mrs Catherine Lalumiere MEP, a former secretary-general of the Council of Europe; Prof Peter Leuprecht of Magill University, Montreal, and a former director of human rights in the Council of Europe; and Judge Antonio Cassesse, of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
The appeal, in the form of an agenda for action for the year 2000, says "there is an urgent need for a human rights policy which is coherent, balanced, substantive and professional." It highlights social developments in the Union which, it says, necessitate a human rights response. These range from the closer integration of the single market and launch of the single currency, to the increase in racism and xenophobia, and "the tendency towards a `fortress Europe' which is hostile to `outsiders' and discourages refugees and asylumseekers." And they warn that "growing co-operation in police and security matters is not matched by adequate human rights standards".
The Union's human rights policy also needs to be more closely integrated into its development policies, the group says. "The Union has devoted a great deal of energy and resources to human rights, both in its internal and external policies. Yet, the fragmented and hesitant nature of many of its initiatives has left the Union with a vast number of individual policies and programmes but without a real human rights policy as such." The appeal argues that there is plenty of scope for "broader-based efforts to promote non-discrimination and equality in all the fields of Community law, including the internal market, the workplace, in access to education and training, in structural funds and public procurement."
The group warns that "within Europe we see pressures to shape asylum policy to accommodate nationalism and to weaken international protection standards in the name of greater efficiency or the need to meet new challenges. Both the EU and the European Court of Justice must take seriously the explicit commitment in the Amsterdam Treaty to those standards".
The group also urges accession by the EU as a body to the European Convention on Human Rights and the development of EU law to give individuals better rights of access on human rights issues to the European Court of Justice.
Rejecting the idea that the EU should assume full authority over human rights issues in the member states, the group nevertheless argues that "neither do we accept the more commonly-held view that human rights should be matters solely for the member states."
