Czech Journal of International Relations (Mar 2007)
Foreign Policy in the Field of Human Rights - Towards Methods of Analysis
Abstract
Contemporarily human rights are ranked among the most crucial foreign policy priorities in many countries. At the same time numerous states are forced to consider the human rights agenda under growing international pressure. The substance of foreign policy in the field of human rights, its intensity and instruments vary in many different aspects. The paper focuses on foreign policy in the field of human rights analysis. Its aim is to comprehend and extend prevailing methods in order to obtain an analytical scheme applicable to almost every country. To fulfil this aim it includes several steps, the most important of which are: examining the essence of analysing foreign policy in the field of human rights as a specific part of the foreign policy agenda, introduction and elaboration of the so called Mower's apparatus, interpretation of foreign policy in the field of human rights using different levels of analysis and developing methods of its evaluation. In the end the paper summarises the current state of research and makes some recommendations for the future.
