Human Rights and Democracy - Official Documents

With support from several other member states, we also took a leading role in
pushing for the EU to improve its work on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
(LGBT) rights. Working closely with other member states and NGOs, we helped the
Spanish presidency develop an LGBT “toolkit”, loosely based on our own FCO
toolkit. The EU LGBT toolkit, adopted by EU ministers, gives practical guidance to
EU diplomats in third countries on working with international and civil society
organisations and local governments to promote and protect LGBT rights. The
European Council also agreed conclusions on child labour and on democracy in
2010, helping to promote awareness and action on these important issues.
EU enlargement
The European Union is founded upon the values of “respect for human dignity,
freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including
the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” It also stipulates that any European
state that respects and is committed to promoting these values may apply to become
a member of the EU. EU enlargement is therefore a powerful mechanism for helping
to improve human rights records in countries wishing to join the EU.
The Government is a strong supporter of EU enlargement, and is committed to
supporting the membership aspirations of any European country that meets these
criteria, and its right to progress towards membership on the basis of its own merits.
We will encourage the EU to conclude accession negotiations only when we are
confident that a candidate country is able to meet the political, economic and legal
obligations of membership. These include the protection of human rights.
Furthermore, we will be active in determining how the membership criteria are met,
for example, by setting benchmarks which tackle important issues at an early stage
in the process. We will also work within the EU to influence the allocation of EU preaccession
assistance to ensure that aspirant countries tackle effectively and at an
early stage those issues that matter most to us, including human rights violations.
In 2010 we provided technical support to human rights reform in candidate and precandidate
countries in order to help these countries meet EU standards. We worked
with the government of Croatia to improve court administration by introducing
modern case management techniques to reduce the backlog of cases and improve
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