Three Decades of the EU's Human Rights Promotion in Post-Soviet Countries

Abstract

Over the last 30 years, human rights protections in the states of the former Soviet Union have been affected by both internal and external political dynamics. Internally, human rights have been much influenced by domestic regime developments; meanwhile, externally, post-Soviet countries, albeit to different extents, have been experiencing pressure to improve domestic practices in this domain. The European Union (EU) is exceptional in being an external actor that uses a variety of political and economic instruments to encourage and compel third countries to better protect human rights. These instruments range from establishing human rights dialogues and issuing diplomatic statements to imposing sanctions. In this chapter, we analyse the role of the EU in human rights development in former Soviet states. In doing so we first map the EU’s instruments of human rights promotion applied to post-Soviet countries; second, we explain the EU’s spotty record of improving the human rights situation in the region. We show that the explanation for these uneven results is a consequence of both international structural factors, such as the presence of regional black knights and the competing interests of EU member states, and domestic factors including Soviet legacies and vested interests of domestic veto players.