Le organizzazioni internazionali europee fra promozione dei diritti umani e diritto umanitario

This essay aims at critically summarizing the role played by the European Union and the Council of Europe with regard to both the promotion of human rights and humanitarian law following the second world war (para. 2 and 3). The idea is submitted that such a role is currently far from being so active as it was until the end of the '90. A similar conclusion stems from the fact that both the recent case law of the European Court and the recent case law of the Court of Justice (as well as the practice concerning the external relations of the EU in the field of migrations) display a clear tendency not to contribute to the development of the international or the european legal regime of human rights, at variance with the past (par. 4). This tendency appears to be all the more worrying if one only considers the traditional importance of the promotion of human rights in the context of the european integration process as a whole. In other words such a tendency is seen as a symptom of the more general state of crisis of this process.