External Relations of the EU

The paper assesses the remedies, redress and review mechanisms under two transatlantic security Agreements since their enactment up to the present day, focussing upon the latest EU-US PNR Agreement and its evolution and the EU-US TFTP Agreement. It is argued that the operation of a plethora of governance mechanisms exposes the hollowness of review, remedies and redress within the Agreements, which do not seem to be mitigated or compensated for by rights or redress provisions, for example, to judicial review. The paper shows that there are significant shortcomings in the operation of the reviews of these two Agreements. The operation of the Agreements emphasise how law and governance mechanisms do not necessarily compensate for each other as checks and balances. Accordingly, they demonstrate reasons that the EU should be particularly cautious about replicating this rule-making in EU law, i.e. in adopting an EU PNR based upon the EU-US PNR and a TFTS, based upon the EU-US TFTP.

This paper evaluates the capacity of the European Union and its institutions to contribute to cooperative security among the Soviet successor states and integrate them into the emerging European order.  It attempts a general and comprehensive review and evaluation of which categories of international instruments are open to the EU to optimize the financial-economic stabilization in the Soviet successor states, promoting political arrangements for cooperative security, and how they may be used to that end.

"THE EUROPEANIZATION OF MINORITY RIGHTS IN TURKEY: NON-MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE EU ACCESSION PROCESS


ABSTRACT

The conventional elements of Turkey’s minority regime are based on the legal framework of the Lausanne Peace Treaty, the state’s political maneuverings and societal attitudes. The EU seriously challenges the conventional treatment of minorities in Turkey. The Commission via its annual progress reports on Turkey, the Council via its summit decisions and the Parliament via oral and written questions addressed in the assembly emphasize the need for a better treatment of minorities in Turkey and call on Turkey to improve its human as well as minority rights records. From the Turkish perspective, there is no need for an immense reform since the Turkish Constitution and the Lausanne Treaty provides protection and equal treatment of non-Muslim minorities, which also allegedly satisfies the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership. The EU’s pressure for the improvement of minority rights did not change this attitude and the Turkish state tries to satisfy the EU demands under the wider framework of changes in human rights and individual rights. In the Turkish context, the solution to minority rights is to handle them through improvements in three realms: elimination of discrimination, cultural rights and religious freedom. However, although reforms in these spheres point to an Europeanization process, they fall short of the spirit precluded in the Treaty of Lausanne and the Copenhagen criteria.
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The scope of the European Union's (EU) foreign economic policies has broadened significantly since the signing of the Rome Treaties in 1957. 2 Over this half century, EU member states both formally and informally have delegated significant powers to carry out these policies to various European institutions. In trade policy, the European Commission now negotiates on behalf of the EU not only on tariff levels, but also on issues such as direct investments and intellectual property rights.

The article looks at the EU and China three decade relationship and the challenges and opportunities encouraged by a common view for redesign of the international order according to a multilateral approach and some basic differences. The author analyzed the principal) policy documents approved by the European Commission and the European Council, over the years, looking to extract EU benchmark for this relationship and shows how the Chinese regard the European Union in the context of the PRC’s foreign policy.

"Most recently, restrictive measures adopted against private individuals have stirred up a lot of controversy. Essentially, these measures identify natural and legal persons as terrorist suspects, freeze their assets, and impose travel bans against them. On the one hand, sanctions against individuals are considered to be more advanced than trade embargoes against states. Although they pursue the same aim of maintaining international peace and security, they do not indistinctly restrict the rights of whole populations. On the other hand, sanctions against individuals are adopted pursuant to essentially the same procedures as sanctions against states. Consequently, they are heavily criticized for disregarding well-established procedural rights. Certainly, individual sanctions are an illustrative example of how ‘global governance’ dealing with de-territorialized problems of today’s world directly impacts on the rights of individuals.

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The paper examines the performance of the operation EU NAVFOR Atalanta, putting it the wider historical context of the European integration process as well as Europe’s role in contemporary international relations. To this end, the paper first introduces the operation, delves into how it was conceived and assesses its performance to date. Subsequently, it argues that Operation Atalanta represents an important benchmark for the credibility of the European Union as a global actor and thus constitutes a logical continuation of the European integration process. It shows that Europe and its nations have come a long way since the fight against the Barbary pirates of the past.

This introduction to the special section on European liberal discourses discusses three themes covered by all contributions: (i) the co-existence of several market liberal discourses in the European public sphere; (ii) interactions among these various discourses; (iii) and discursive changes resulting from these interactions.

This paper offers a conceptual analysis of the negotiation of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union. It argues that traditional accounts of the structure of trade negotiations must be tailored for their novel nature, especially their wider scope on various regulatory issues and the relative economic weight symmetry of trading partners. To build our argument, we revisit traditional structural factors such as economic interdependence, non-agreement alternatives (NAA), institutional constraints, outcome valuations, and domestic support. We conclude that current and future bilateral trade negotiations will likely last longer, deadlocks will likely become more frequent, and that variations in scope will likely increase.