Human rights and the European Union’s external trade policy: the cases of Kenya and Ethiopia

Abstract

Protection of human rights is the conerstone of the European Union’s identity and legally mandated by Article 21 of the Treaty on European Union to be universally applied in all external action of the European Union. However, this application of human rights in European Union’s cooperation with third countries has noted to be inconsistent by the critisism of the Normative Power Europe framework, especially in cooperation with African countries which have recently gained strategic and economic importance for the European Union. This thesis addresses the question of to what extent human rights have been applied in European Union’s trade relations with Kenya and Ethiopia. To explore the possible differences between the cases, this study conducts a comparative qualitative content analysis of European Union’s policy and trade documents between 2019 and 2024. The study identifies variations in human rights integration across four deductive categories: normative framing, conditionality, language intensity and universality. The findings reveal that inconsistencies do exist in the case of Ethiopia and Kenya. In relations to more stable country like Kenya, human rights are integrated as technical market standards and human rights are presented in trade documents to a low political extent. In the case of Ethiopia that was more crisis-driven country in the research period, human rights act as preconditions for further or any trade cooperation.