Beyond the Charter: How Enlargement Has Enlarged the Human Rights Policy of the European Union

The contention of this Article, however, is that a number of other developments have taken place which--in mostly unanticipated ways--may lead to more significant change in the scope and shape of EU human rights policy than the Charter alone. In particular, two developments have combined in recent years to open the way for a more general and comprehensive human rights policy which, while less concerned with the contentious competence and justiciability debates generated by the Charter, is already beginning to manifest itself in interesting ways. The first of these developments was the shaping of a more principled and graduated crisis response procedure for the suspension of the rights of Member States in response to serious and persistent violations of human rights. The second development was an unprecedented degree of scrutiny of the human rights performance of prospective Member States which served to highlight the familiar double-standards critique in relation to the EU\u27s internal and external policies, and provided a major impetus to the development of more effective ongoing monitoring and coordination arrangements