Governance in a multi-actor system. Enforcing human rights through orchestration

Abstract or Introduction

The European Union (EU) is one of the main global actors in promoting human rights. Values such as freedom, democracy, dignity, equality and fundamental human rights are not only embedded in the treaties which all EU member states approved voluntarily, but a separate Charter codifying certain political, economic and social rights for all EU citizens has been adopted in 2000 and is legally binding for all EU member states since 2009. Given that all EU member states are already part of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the EU Charter offers an extra layer of protection and promotion of human rights by obliging the organs of the EU to actively engage in the fulfillment of this goal and establishes an additional mode of enforcement.

Most states are bound to several mechanisms that promote and protect human rights (United Nations Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ECHR, African Charter on Human Rights, American Charter on Human Rights and many more). The existence of numerous binding and non-binding treaties and regimes that all have the same objective, namely protecting certain fundamental human rights, shows on the one hand how important the issue is and that this importance is recognized worldwide, but on the other hand it reveals that the infringement of human rights is frequent. It would not be necessary to bind states to ever more regimes if they complied to the already existing ones and perfectly respected human rights.