Conference: Human Rights and EU Crisis Management Operations: A Duty to Respect and to Protect?

On May 25, 2012, the Centre for the Law of EU External Relations (CLEER), the Netherlands Defence Academy, and the T.M.C. Asser Instituut will host a conference on on "Human Rights and EU Crisis Management Operations: A Duty to Respect and to Protect?" in The Hague. The program is here. Here's the idea:

Over the course of the last decade, the European Union has acquired an operational capability enabling it to deploy military and civilian crisis management missions in third countries in pursuit of its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). Since 2003, the EU has launched more than twenty CSDP missions, ranging from large-scale military and civilian deployments in the Balkans to more modest security sector reform and monitoring missions in Georgia, Guinea Bissau and elsewhere.

The conduct of the Union’s crisis management operations raises a number of questions relating to human rights law that merit urgent academic attention. The conference will bring together a group of academic and professional experts to explore two cross-cutting themes: (1) the duty to ensure respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in EU crisis management missions and (2) the contribution that such missions make to the Union’s policy of promoting human rights at the international level.

Highly-recognized legal scholars as well as practitioners from Member States’ administrations, the Council of the European Union (its Secretariat and Legal Service) and the European Parliament will discuss the challenges of the human rights dimension in the EU’s conduct of crisis management operations.