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.