A Progressive Promoter of Women's Rights? Comparing EU Policy towards the ACP and the EMP Countries. Bruges Regional Integration & Global Governance Papers #3.2015
The paper offers an analysis of the degree to which two different external policy
frameworks of the European Union (EU) have institutionalised and operationalised the
EU’s commitment to women’s rights and gender equality. It compares the EU’s
relations with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries with the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), using Senegal and Morocco as case studies.
Although the comparison shows some resemblances between the two cases, as a
whole women’s rights seem more deeply embedded in the institutional framework of
EU-ACP relations than that of Euro-Mediterranean relations, and this together with
the EU’s approach towards implementation has enabled its women’s rights policy to
be slightly more influential on the ground in Senegal than in Morocco. However, both
EU-ACP and EMP frameworks have their limits, reflecting the more general problem
of inconsistency between the EU’s declaratory objectives and its actual promotion of
human rights
