Proposed Partnership Agreement Between EU, Developing Countries Builds on Past Negotiation Losses

By | April 23, 2021

WASHINGTON, D.C. April 23 (C-Fam) The European Union (EU) is working with countries in the Pacific, Caribbean and African regions to finalize a new twenty-year development cooperation agreement.  If adopted, the proposed agreement text would add further leverage to the EU’s efforts to promote controversial issues like abortion and comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in those developing regions.

A proposed text being circulated calls on the countries in developing regions to “support universal access to sexual and reproductive health commodities and healthcare services” and “commit to sexual and reproductive health and rights” (SRHR).  It also urges each region to “take into consideration” the UNESCO international technical guidance on comprehensive sexuality education.

In addition to the global agreements adopted at the UN, past regional conferences have produced outcome documents, several of which included text on controversial social issues that have never been adopted at the global level.  In its specific regional protocols for Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, the draft agreement invokes several of the most problematic from a pro-life and pro-family perspective. One is the Montevideo Consensus, which was held in 2013 in the Latin America and Caribbean region and has been cited as a major factor in the decisions by some countries in the region to liberalize their abortion laws.  According to several feminist groups, “the total absence of conservative civil society and anti-abortion voices in Montevideo was also a key factor” in its adoption.  Another document mentioned in the African protocol is the Maputo Protocol, “the first pan-African treaty to explicitly recognize abortion as a human right, under specific circumstances.”

The draft agreement requires developing countries and the European Union to adop “common positions on the world stage,” a provision that will likely be used to pressure delegates to conform with the EU position on social issues, or intimidate individual delegates that defend their own countries’ pro-life or pro-family laws and policies.

Since 2000, the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) and EU partnership, which began in the late 1950s, was subject to an agreement adopted in Cotonou, the capital of Benin.  Among the most controversial aspects of the Cotonou Agreement was its political aspect: it made aid conditional on elements like respect for human rights.  While this might seem harmless or even positive, the increasing distortions of what constitutes human rights standards in high-level multilateral bodies, which are often led by the EU, creates cause for concern.

At a previous European Commission consultation on the post-Cotonou partnership, “[t]he conclusion of the European stakeholders was unanimous: European aid must remain conditional upon respect for human rights and the rule of law in recipient countries.”

Among the largest areas of disagreement is sexual orientation and gender identity, particularly between the EU and the African region.  Of equal importance is the radical shift on LGBT issues that has taken place within the European region since 2000, which was one year before the Netherlands were first to adopt legal same-sex marriage.

If adopted in its currently proposed form, the new agreement would add further power to the EU’s ability to promote its “sexual rights” agenda around the world: by attaching strings to aid, silencing opposing voices in multilateral institutions, and ensuring that the greatest regional failures of negotiation, such as the Montevideo Consensus and the Maputo Protocol, only become further entrenched.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter