The legal framework of collaboration between the European Union and the United Nations in the area of human rights protection

Abstract

The current abundance of governmental international organisations, combined with a wide spectrum of tasks put before them frequently leads to a situation in which statutory tasks of those organisations clash or overlap. This doubling of tasks of individual organisations has resulted in development of a new area of organisational activity termed inter-organisationalism, based on collaboration of international organisations of similar interests and goals. One of the prominent spheres in which such collaboration flourishes is human rights protection, where collaboration between the United Nations and the European Union is particularly noteworthy as being an attempt to combine and use efficiently the potential of a huge but not free from financial difficulties global organisation with the opportunities available to a regional organisation which, although lacking global institutional structures, enjoys access to substantially much larger financial resources. The purpose of this article is to present a concise analysis of the existing and potential legal forms of collaboration of these two organisations (the UN and the EU) in the area of human rights protection, and to identify the effects of such collaboration as well as potential areas of conflict between their legal systems.