LONG READ
October 16, 2025
By ECFR
By Anthony Dworkin
The great transformation
In a major speech in Riyadh earlier this year, President Donald Trump hailed the great transformation of Saudi Arabia and its neighbours as the work of their people, not of interfering foreigners “giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs”. Trump’s comments, which were greeted with loud applause, point up the difficulties external actors now face in promoting human rights and democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. The region is under the sway of a neo-authoritarian order dominated by the Gulf monarchies, and the democratic transitions that began in 2011 have all faltered. A sovereigntist sentiment, favouring greater national autonomy, has gained headway across much of the region, increasing opposition to any idea that external partners should promote political change domestically. The United States—the strongest outside power—has now largely abandoned human rights promotion, and other external powers that do not condition their support on such standards, like China and Russia, have gained influence.
This changed context accentuates a dilemma that European countries have grappled with for the last decade. The EU has traditionally prided itself on its commitment to human rights. After the pro-democracy Arab uprisings of 2011, the EU vowed to pursue a relationship with its southern neighbourhood built on a “shared commitment to the universal values of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.” But in the following years, the region’s commitment to these values faded, while European countries prioritised security and migration cooperation over any meaningful reforms. The EU continued to pay lip service to human rights and democracy, yet its institutions and member states showed minimal commitment to advancing these values with their regional partners, let alone achieving any great success.
In recent years, European policymakers have sought to shed any hint of paternalism by framing ties with the region as a partnership of equals. But it is not clear whether this concept leaves room for Europe to promote human rights and political reform in the face of local resistance: the idea of equal partnerships seems to exclude one partner commenting on the internal political arrangements of the other. Moreover, it is now even more difficult to promote human rights in the region because a pervasive sense that European leaders have supported Israel’s brutal war in Gaza over the past two years has deeply damaged European credibility. Israel’s expansive use of force across the region also runs counter to the de-escalatory and law-based approaches needed to improve political, economic and social rights.
Against this background, European policymakers may be tempted to abandon their aspirations for human rights and democracy in the Middle East. But that would be a mistake. European interests will not be served by leaving human rights out of the picture. On the contrary, oppressed populations are more likely to cause instability or seek to emigrate. Unaccountable governments tend to pursue policies that do not foster what Europeans want to see on their doorstep: lasting stability and growth. These can best be promoted by helping societies become more inclusive, accountable and responsive.
The EU still holds credibility as a genuine reform partner that rivals cannot match, despite the reputational hit over Gaza and tough migration policies. European influence will exceed anything a purely transactional approach can offer when the bloc grounds its engagement in support for rights and opportunities in partner countries. The EU cannot transform Middle Eastern societies into bastions of human rights and democracy in short order, but it can encourage the development of institutions and processes that tend in that direction. To do this, at a time of limited resources, European policymakers need to be hard-headed about the steps that are likely to lead to meaningful results and prioritise these above merely symbolic gestures.
This paper examines what has worked and not worked, and the costs and benefits of different policies, in order to bring European goals and impact into closer alignment. The EU and European countries can have the greatest impact by encouraging the evolution of Middle Eastern economies and societies in a way that enhances individual freedoms and helps establish counterweights to over-mighty states and entrenched elites—for example, by investing in the longer-term growth of independent bodies. Alongside this, European leaders should pursue opportunistic interventions in individual cases, such as those involving political prisoners, where they can achieve meaningful improvements even if these fall short of systemic change. European policymakers should also facilitate regional de-escalation, which would provide the best environment for improvements in human rights. Finally, the EU should establish and enforce red lines, refusing direct complicity in abuses or support for large-scale violations of fundamental rights.
The evolution of European ineffectiveness
Europe’s commitment to supporting human rights and democracy in the Middle East and North Africa peaked in the years following the 2011 uprisings. After a wave of pro-democracy protests swept the region, the EU adopted a new approach to its neighbourhood, making the level of European support conditional on advances in building democracy and the rule of law. “The more and the faster a country progresses in its internal reforms, the more support it will get from the EU”, the bloc’s key policy document for its neighbourhood stated. As a corollary, the EU would curtail relations with governments that violated human rights and democratic standards, including by imposing targeted sanctions, while keeping open channels of dialogue.
The EU stepped up its support in particular to the democratic pace-setter, Tunisia, and offered increased funding for reforms and rights protection in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco. The bloc also showed some willingness to distance itself from repressive actors. European countries largely held back from diplomatic engagement for the year after General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power in July 2013, and responded with at least moderate criticism when Egyptian security forces killed many hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood protesters in Cairo a month later.
Nevertheless, even at its height, the EU’s “more for more” policy had clear limitations. The bloc lacked the influence to drive far-reaching political reforms in states unwilling to pursue them. Policy documents described the EU’s strategy as an “incentive-based approach”, while some policymakers, with greater realism, described Europe’s role as “accompanying” countries on a reform path that they had chosen for themselves. At the same time, in much of the region, crisis management took priority above political reform. The war in Syria focused European support on refugees. In Israel and Palestine, the EU focused on ineffective steps to promote a peace process and support for the Palestinian Authority, despite its governance shortcomings.
In any case, the prospects for democracy and human rights in the region soon became bleaker. Egypt consolidated authoritarian rule, Libya and Yemen descended into civil war, and the reforms that leaders introduced in Morocco and Jordan proved superficial. The Hirak protest movement in Algeria in 2019 failed to achieve meaningful systemic change, and was followed by a crackdown on civil society.
At the same time, back-to-back crises, such as the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group and the refugee waves that landed on European shores in 2015 and 2016, drove the EU and its member states towards pragmatic engagement with regimes in the region, however weak their human rights credentials. Rather than try to incentivise Mediterranean partners to democratise, Europeans redirected their efforts towards obtaining cooperation on issues such as migration and security that had vital domestic significance—a dynamic that only accelerated as right-wing parties gained influence in European politics.
This pragmatic trend was reinforced by the series of shocks that hit the region, and the world, in the last few years. The covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine battered the region’s more vulnerable economies, such as Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia, encouraging European policymakers to put their stability ahead of human rights. The Ukraine war also led European countries to seek better relations with Algeria, a major gas exporter, as they looked for alternatives to Russian energy supplies. The global push to mitigate climate change has also encouraged European countries to see regional partners, particularly in North Africa, as potential sources of renewable energy.
While European countries came to depend more on Mediterranean partners, other external powers, from Gulf countries to China, Russiaand Turkey, expanded their presence in the region, offering financing and investment without any human rights conditionality. Egypt, in particular, leaned heavily on financing from the Gulf in the years after Sisi’s seizure of power. Meanwhile, China stepped up its infrastructure investments across North Africa. Even where the EU remained the most significant external partner, as in the Maghreb, the perception that it faced competition from geopolitical rivals made European policymakers wary of losing influence.
Losing faith
The growing presence of rivals coincided with a period when countries in the region began to assert their sovereignty more and reacted strongly against any suggestion of post-colonial interference. In response, European policymakers have tried to frame their approach to Middle Eastern regimes and publics as offering partnership without paternalism. This shift in tone indicates that the EU’s move away from human rights conditionality in North Africa and the Levant stems not only from prioritising other interests and possessing limited leverage—it also comes from a deeper European loss of faith in the underlying idea that conditionality is legitimate.
The more transactional European approach to the Mediterranean is exemplified by the series of bilateral partnership agreements that the EU has signed in recent years. These deals combine cooperation on migration control with economic and development aid. Some, such as the strategic partnership with Egypt, pledge to promote democracy and human rights (which is a requirement when giving macro-financial assistance under EU regulations), but these provisions are often mere formalities. In the case of Egypt, there has been little sign of improvement in its poor human rights record since the partnership was signed in March 2024, and little sign either that this will prevent planned European support from going ahead.
This idea of a partnership of equals will be central to the new Pact for the Mediterranean that the EU is due to unveil this autumn, which officials say will be grounded in mutual respect and joint ownership, focusing on a range of practical topics but excluding governance and human rights. It is plausible that joint ownership is the best way to ensure the development projects succeed, since the experience of the last 15 years indicates that it is difficult for Europe to push through reforms when local governments are not committed to them. However, the rhetoric of equal partnership seems to leave little room for Europe to exert pressure on human rights and democracy; the use of leverage to promote political reform implies a critical judgment on the internal arrangements of partner countries that sits uneasily with the idea of mutual respect.
Beyond the southern Mediterranean
Europe’s turn away from a values-based approach in the Middle East extends beyond the Mediterranean. The Gulf monarchies were not part of the “more for more” framework, since they sit outside the European Neighbourhood Policy. Nonetheless, their rising importance as diplomatic actors within the region and as influential economic powers globally has led Europe to step up its engagement with them in recent years, despite their authoritarian nature and intolerance of political dissent.
In 2022, the EU signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and its member states that emphasised trade and investment, energy cooperation, global development, and peace and stability in the Middle East. European countries that imposed restrictions on arms sales to Saudi Arabia after the killing of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 have lifted them. European leaders have limited leverage with the Gulf, and they need to keep them on side in a multipolar world, so they have chosen to downplay criticism of the GCC countries’ human rights shortcomings.
Geopolitical considerations
The two countries in the region where European leaders have taken a much more critical line on human rights are geopolitical adversaries, Syria and Iran. As Bashar al-Assad of Syria unleashed a war on his own people marked by widespread killings and torture, the EU suspended cooperation and imposed sanctions on the regime and key institutions and supporters.
European positions, however, often seemed influenced more by geopolitical—and later migration—interests than by any tangible impact on people’s lives. After the fall of Assad in late 2024, the EU lifted most of its sanctions and declared its support for a peaceful and inclusive transition, overlooking violations to preserve space for the regime to establish itself. In Iran, the EU imposed a series of sanctions in the years after 2011, stepping them up after the death in custody in 2022 of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested for failing to wear the hijab in accordance with regime rules, and the suppression of the protests that followed. But, in the face of criticism from Iranian opposition activists, the EU showed a degree of pragmatism, balancing its censure with efforts to engage with the Iranian regime to persuade it to roll back its nuclear programme and promote de-escalation in the region.
The limits of the traditional toolkit
Despite the EU’s more interest-based posture, the bloc has persevered with some traditional elements of its human rights toolkit, including funding to civil society and human rights dialogues. But these tools have been losing effectiveness because of broader trends in the region and because they are disconnected from European diplomatic support.
Since 2011, many Middle Eastern governments have tightened restrictions on human rights groups and other civil society organisations, including limiting foreign funding and restricting peaceful protest. They have also imposed registration requirements for civil society groups, prosecuted independent journalists and other activists, and used digital surveillance to monitor groups’ activities. The Middle East and North Africa is ranked as the most repressive region in the world for civil society organisations, and where such groups have the least influence on government policy. That means that Europeans are directing funding to organisations that are increasingly constrained, while doing little to challenge the systemic political trends that are fostering repression.
In any case, European aid to local human rights NGOs in the Middle East and North Africa has been falling in recent years, and groups’ finances have been further reduced by Trump’s decision to end most US support for human rights and democracy activists overseas shortly after taking office. In the perception of recipients, too, European policymakers are also shifting funding away from human rights issues and towards areas such as stability, counterterrorism and migration.
EU and member state officials persist with human rights dialogues with regional counterparts, either through cooperation and association agreements or as freestanding talks with countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While these structured discussions have value as a way to highlight concerns, it is widely recognised in academic and policy circles (and echoed in the EU guidelines on the subject) that dialogues work best as part of a broader human rights engagement with the country. In the Middle East, such dialogues often seem to replace real diplomatic pressure, lacking consequences when progress stalls.
Finally, the EU’s credibility on human rights in the region has been badly damaged by its response to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the wider Middle East in the last two years. The military campaign that Israel launched against Hamas after the group’s attack on Israel in 2023 caused large-scale civilian casualties, repeatedly displaced the territory’s population, and struck hospitals, medical workers and journalists—widely assessed as war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel’s restrictions on food and other humanitarian assistance entering Gaza have led many organisations, including a panel appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, to conclude that Israel is guilty of genocide. The EU and many member states were slow to condemn Israel’s actions or cut off support, prompting accusations of double standards across the Arab world. Beyond Gaza, Israel’s actions in the West Bank and attacks against Lebanon, Syria, Iran and other countries threaten to undermine the international rule of law and institute a regional order defined by military force.
Why Europe should not abandon human rights
Against this background, it might seem that Europe should simply step back from human rights and governance and focus instead on pursuing its interests in a difficult geopolitical environment. But European objectives in the region are unlikely to be met without a significant improvement in states’ respect for human rights. The pursuit of stability and inclusive economic growth is strongly linked to the promotion of human rights, including economic, social and cultural rights alongside civil and political ones. A recent Arab barometer surveyin seven Arab countries concluded that citizens’ top political demand is for dignity, understood as economic and personal security combined with political rights. Governments in the region have persistently denied this demand, which is likely to continue fuelling public alienation and increasing the pressures that lead to migration and potential future instability. This has already happened once. During the 2011 uprisings, “dignity” became a rallying cry symbolising the urgent need for political rights and economic opportunities.
The hold of elite-linked special interests over economic decision-making is the central obstacle to inclusive economic growth and generating opportunities for the region’s people. The role of the militaryin the Egyptian economy or the allocation of public funds in Iraq to purchase loyalty to the regime are two among many examples.
Overcoming economic stagnation does not require a widespread transition to liberal democracy, but it does demand a change in the relations of states and citizens, with greater accountability, a more level playing field, and more space for a dynamic private sector outside the state’s control.
European successes
Despite the difficulties outlined above, Europe has achieved some tangible human rights results. The EU and European countries have at times secured the release of unjustly detained activists and prevented legislation that limits individual freedoms. In Egypt, European officials were apparently instrumental in securing the release of detained members of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) in 2020, and may have played a role in freeing EIPR founder and investigative journalist Hossam Bahgat in 2015. French pressure has been credited with helping free the Egyptian-Palestinian activist Ramy Shaath in 2022, and consistent British pressure seems to have paved the way for the release of the dissident Alaa Abd el-Fattah last month.
More broadly, the campaign of the International Dialogue Group to negotiate the release of political prisoners may have been aided by the perception that Egypt’s human rights record affected its relations with Europe, as well as the US. In Tunisia, civil society activists credited European officials’ advocacy with helping delay the promulgation of a new law regulating civil society in 2022.[1] Saudi Arabia has also released human rights defenders and reduced the sentences of others following international, including European, pressure.
Finally, despite the accusations of double standards it has faced over Israel’s campaign in Gaza, Europe’s reputation in the region is still based in part on the principles it is associated with: it retains a degree of credibility as a partner for at least some types of reform in the Middle East. A June survey of civil society members from the southern Mediterranean found that they saw the EU’s added value as a partner to lie both in its multi-sectoral approach and its cooperation on human rights.
The largest number of respondents (36%) also called for the EU to prioritise economic development, trade and investment, while a lower number (11%) said it should focus on governance and democracy.
The poll suggests that Europe would undermine its standing and influence in the region if it abandoned human rights in favour of a purely realpolitik position, but it also points to how European policymakers could shift their priorities for reform in the Middle East. They could rebalance their reform agenda to include a clearer emphasis on economic and social rights to appeal to Middle Eastern public opinion.
A realistic agenda
Europe’s experience over the last 15 years and its relationship with the Middle East and North Africa suggest that it can still play a role in supporting human rights in the region. But it needs to adopt a new strategy that is realistic about the current environment and the limits that this imposes. Instead of treating human rights and democracy as a condition for cooperation—which was never fully adopted but has remained as a shadow presence in the EU’s regional policy—the EU should embrace advancing human rights gradually as an integral part of the objectives it seeks to achieve through its regional engagement.
A central element in this approach would be to prioritise helping people in the region to realise their economic and social rights, where Europe has more scope to achieve systemic change than with civil and political rights. But the EU should complement this developmental focus with other policies to maximise its support for the full range of human rights. It should intervene wherever possible on individual cases of rights violations, pursue de-escalation across the region, and maintain red lines to avoid direct complicity in abuses.
Focus on development
Limited opportunities, inadequate public services and crony capitalism and corruption hold people back across the region. European leaders should direct cooperation towards solving these problems, empowering people by improving the state’s investment in human development and expanding the space for an independent and dynamic private sector to develop. Such an agenda would be relevant to many countries, from Morocco—where young people are protesting the poor state of public services and private sector growth is held back by competition shortcomings—to Iraq, where the government has launched a programme to increase resource mobilisation and calls are growing to develop the private sector.
Enlarging people’s ability to forge their own economic pathways and limiting the constraints imposed by regime-linked economic interests would have direct benefits for people’s quality of life. But it could also prepare the way for expanding political freedom and improving governance over time. Ultimately, as the political scientist Jack Snyder has argued, expanding the social power of constituencies favouring liberal political reforms, particularly the rule of law and limits on the power of entrenched elites, is the best way to prepare the ground for civil and political rights to take root.
Supporting economic and social development would go hand in hand with existing trends in the region, since many governments are already pursuing economic reform. Some have embraced the goals of private sector growth and increasing opportunity, and are open to partnerships with Europe to advance them—so a European focus on these areas would fit well with its emphasis on joint ownership. Indeed, some European officials argue that the EU is already pursuing a normative approach that focuses on economic transformation, like the one this paper recommends.[2] However, to make such a policy meaningful, the EU needs to ensure it is implemented in practice. It must not focus primarily on short-term cooperation on European priorities and leave more challenging longer-term economic and social transformation as a mere aspiration.
To promote individual empowerment, European policymakers should combine capacity building (to improve the functioning of states in the region and private enterprises) with more structural changes to the political economy of partner societies (to expand opportunities). Improving public services, and by extension improving people’s education and health, would help them take advantage of opportunities. Capacity building also aims to assist governments with changes they often embrace but which may be politically contentious: mobilising resources for improved public services may involve raising money from influential sectors or diverting spending away from them. Structural reform is even more likely to meet resistance, since it generally demands some confrontation with vested interests that have close ties to the regime. European leaders need to anticipate and work around domestic political interests to ensure their engagement genuinely expands economic space and promotes economic and social improvements.
The challenges are evident in specific cases. Some governments have set out ambitious reform programmes. Morocco’s King Mohammed VI has endorsed a “new development model” built around improving human capital and boosting private sector-led growth. Jordan is working towards an “economic modernisation vision” based on a competitive and inclusive economy. Nevertheless, Morocco has struggled to translate ambition into improved public services and employment amid persistent cronyism and corruption, and needs further reforms to reduce barriers to education, training and finance. Meanwhile, Jordan is still experiencing high unemployment deriving from unresolved structural labour market problems. The EU needs to find ways to encourage the Moroccan and Jordanian governments to go further in addressing these problems.
In other cases, more serious doubts arise over partners’ commitment to reforms that will improve their citizens’ quality of life. The EU’s memorandum of understanding with Tunisia has been largely stillborn because Tunisian president Kais Saied rejects reforms proposed by the IMF; instead, he has persisted with economic policies that stifle employment and private sector investment and drive up the cost of living. In Egypt, there is little sign that Sisi is taking any real steps to implement policies in the EU’s partnership agreement that would challenge the military’s hold over the country’s economy, since he relies on the army as the support base for his regime. In Lebanon, the EU agreed a €1bn assistance package at a time when the country faced too much upheaval to be able to undertake meaningful reforms; after a change of government, the fate of reform proposals is still in the balance.
In all these countries, the EU needs to ensure that its financial assistance is only provided if partners are complying with their commitments. While political conditionality may not now be feasible, economic conditionality is essential in ensuring that EU funding serves agreed goals. If Egypt does not use the economic space that European and other financing has bought to reform its economic model, the EU could face further financing demands in the not-so-distant future.
The EU can steer cooperation to boost the private sector in other ways—for instance, by backing renewable energy projects. These meet a European need and, as a new sector, they are comparatively free of vested interests. Funding should target those areas that offer the greatest chance of real economic and social advances; projects not contributing to them should be scaled back. This is not a question of putting values before interests but rather making sure that European interests are understood in a longer-term perspective.
What European leaders can hope to achieve in any relationship is context-specific. The more influence that the EU and individual European countries have as development partners, the more they can direct their support to programmes and projects that will shape the path of the country involved. Where possible, European policymakers should use their leverage with local governments to encourage them to adopt more ambitious reforms than they might otherwise choose to.
In other cases, Europeans will have less clout. It is perhaps a telling indicator of the shortcomings of the EU’s role in recent years that the countries with the most radical programmes of transformation—notably the Gulf monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia—are those with some of the least developed relationships with the EU. Of course, the Saudi reform programme is taking place under tight government control, with strictly limited individual rights; nevertheless, where it expands freedoms, European policymakers should support it, for example by providing technical assistance on green and digital transitions.
Syria could also be a test case for a developmental vision of human rights. The fall of the Assad regime offers the chance of a dramatically improved future for the Syrian people. While the country’s transition remains precarious, Europe should seize the opportunity to do what it can to help build an inclusive and stable political order, through assistance with institution building, humanitarian aid and rebuilding civil society.
More broadly, the EU needs to adapt its strategies in response to the reduction in funding for human rights organisations and the tightening of space for civil society in the region. European support is already becoming more defensive—for instance, by focusing on groups with less overtly political goals and those working at the community level—as a pragmatic response to these challenges. But donors should go further by coordinating more closely and prioritising areas that can help build counterweights to the state. This could mean focusing on topical themes, such as justice in green transitions, or key countries, such as Syria, where there could be a unique opportunity to help build civil society movements that can influence the country’s direction.
The vision set out here is admittedly modest. It falls short of the aspirations that many people in the region have for greater civil and political rights, and the goals that many Europeans believed they could help achieve 15 years ago. Nevertheless, it still offers a way to help improve people’s rights and lay the groundwork for incremental reforms in the future.
That said, the EU’s regional human rights strategy should not be limited to promoting rights through development. The bloc should complement this approach with other steps that could have a more immediate impact.
Use influence without conditionality
European leaders now have limited scope to promote systemic change on civil and political rights in the Middle East and North Africa, but they can still make a difference in specific cases. They should not abandon this goal, since it is aligned with European interests and values, and since activists still look to Europe for support. Without making human rights an explicit condition of engagement, European policymakers can signal that countries’ rights records are likely to have an influence on the depth of their relations with the EU. Most governments are concerned about their international reputation and will take some steps to forestall criticism. This can sometimes be enough to produce results, particularly in cases where regimes do not see a threat to their hold on power.
Interventions, however, should focus on meaningful demands, such as freeing political prisoners or dropping cases against human rights groups. Middle Eastern governments sometimes announce significant-sounding processes to assuage foreign critiques, but these can amount to little in practice. Egypt’s 2021 human rights strategy was produced, tellingly, by the foreign ministry, suggesting its main purpose was for external public relations. It has not led to any significant improvement in the country’s human rights record. The National Council for Human Rights, which was relaunched at the same time as the publication of the strategy, was downgraded for its lack of independence by the international authority that certifies national human rights bodies, the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions. The EU’s political culture favours institutions and processes, but the bloc should resist being swayed by façade structures and insist on tangible impacts in individual cases or in improving legislation.
De-escalate conflict
Conflict is a primary cause of rights violations in the region. This is true most obviously of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and its increasing use of force in the West Bank, but it extends much more widely. Israel’s 12-day war against Iran was apparently aimed in part to weaken and perhaps topple an oppressive regime, even attacking Evin prison where many political detainees have been held, but this put the country’s rulers on the defensive and has led only to an increase in repression. In Libya, years of conflict and stand-off between rival political centres have devastated civil and political rights and the country’s economic and social development. The success of Syria’s fragile transition depends not only on the willingness of the country’s leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to establish an inclusive political process but also on the restraint of foreign interference.
The Middle East is poised between an Israeli drive to reshape the region by force and a regional drive, led by countries including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, to reduce tensions and restore balance among regional powers. Although Israel and its backers hold out the prospectof a better future for the people of the Middle East, Israel’s use of military force—often in apparent contravention of international law—is most likely to lead to further instability, conflict and suffering. European countries should use their diplomatic weight to push for de-escalation and exert pressure on allies as well as geopolitical foes like Iran.
Maintain red lines
The recommendations so far focus on seizing specific opportunities without requiring consistency across Europe’s diverse regional relationships. But any credible commitment to human rights depends on reliably maintaining certain red lines—especially to avoid European complicity in human rights abuses.
The first red line is that the EU and European countries should not fund or support activities that directly contribute to human rights violations. This is a strict requirement under the EU’s own regulations, yet the EU has not always met it in recent years. According to multiple investigative reports, European funding for migration cooperation with Tunisia has been used in the country’s repressive crackdown on migrants, including expulsions to desert areas on Tunisia’s borders and alleged sexual assaults. There have also been extensive reports over many years that European support for Libyan migration authorities and armed groups has facilitated detention and abuse. Italy’s desire to preserve cooperation with Libyan authorities on migration apparently contributed to its decision to allow a Libyan prison governor to return to the country despite an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
The EU should also draw a red line on close ties with countries committing fundamental violations of international law. Determining what level of violation warrants a response is a judgment call when the EU needs to cooperate with regimes that all have human rights shortcomings. Nevertheless, the bloc’s slowness to criticise Israel’s Gaza campaign and its reluctance to scale back its close ties with Israel undermine its claim to act in support of human rights. Some European countries and EU officials have condemned Israel’s actions and cut off direct military support, but the EU did not restrict cooperation with Israel under its association agreement.
Rights and realities
This is not a propitious moment for Europe to set ambitious goals for advancing human rights in the Middle East and North Africa in the short term. The regional context, the rising influence of other outside powers, and the ambiguous European record militate against any suggestion that the EU or individual European countries can drive systemic change on human rights through their current partnerships. But abandoning human rights would be an error. European longer-term interests are likely to be met only by increasing the rights enjoyed by Middle Eastern populations. By adopting a realistic understanding of European influence and focusing on more clearly defined goals, Europe may achieve more across the full range of human rights than it has done in recent years.
The most important step that European policymakers could take would be to consistently support measures that increase social and economic space to empower the region’s people in asserting and cementing their rights. This would both be valuable in itself and could provide a foundation for opening greater political space in the future. To succeed, European leaders need to balance short-term transactional engagement with support for challenging economic reforms that open opportunities for the region’s people. Where regional partners are not following through on agreed objectives, European partners should scale back support.
Beyond this developmental approach, the EU should also keep raising civil and political rights, and keep actively defending human rights activists. It should strategically target civil society support in each country to priorities that best resist encroachments on human rights or expand the scope for individual empowerment. Regional de-escalation should be a core part of the EU strategy on human rights. And, even as the bloc adapts to the limits on what it can realistically achieve, it must be firm in avoiding complicity in rights violations—both as a legal obligation and to preserve its credibility as a partner in increasing respect for human rights overseas.
The approach recommended in this policy brief involves some delicate political judgments. European officials should not make respect for human rights a condition for engagement with regional partners, but they should preserve the idea that this respect influences the quality and depth of their relationship with EU. They should approach regional partners as equals but also push for agreements that promote sustained stability and opportunity. They should acknowledge Europe’s own human rights shortcomings but not accept that this invalidates any effort to promote rights in their partnerships. In sum, they should be realistic without being defeatist. Stability and prosperity in the Middle East and North Africa in the long term should be enough of an incentive for European leaders to make the effort involved in working with countries in the region towards greater observance of the full range of human rights.About the author: Anthony Dworkin is a senior policy fellow at ECFR, working on human rights, democracy, Europe’s role in the international system and North Africa.
Source: This article was published by ECFR
Acknowledgments: This policy brief was made possible through support for ECFR’s Middle East and North Africa programme provided by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In writing it, I have benefited greatly from discussions with my programme colleagues: Julien Barnes-Dacey, Cinzia Bianco, Ellie Geranmayeh, Camille Lons, Hugh Lovatt, Tarek Megerisi, Kelly Petillo, and Elsa Scholz. Thanks to Kat Fytatzi for an excellent edit, to Jeremy Cliffe for help formulating the argument and to Nastassia Zenovich for creating the graphics.
[1] Author’s interview with Tunisian civil society activist, 11 May 2022.
[2] Author’s discussion with a senior EU official, Brussels, 24 June 2025.
The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take collective positions. ECFR publications only represent the views of their individual authors.
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