Inter-organizational Contestation and the EU: Its Ambivalent Profile in Human Rights Protection

This article examines how the EU interacts with other international organizations (IOs) with regard to human rights protection. Although studies on relations between IOs, namely inter-organizational relations (IOR), have attempted to overcome a state-centric tendency, existing IOR approaches are not suitable for analyzing human rights issues due to their indifference to law. To overcome this flaw, this article introduces the notion of ‘inter-organizational contestation’ to account for the human rights implications of EU policies. This concept is applied to two contrasting cases: first, the EU's asylum policy, over which the EU is contested by other IOs; second, the implementation of targeted sanctions, over which the EU contests another IO. The article thus highlights the EU's ambivalent profile in human rights protection and contributes to the IOR literature.