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One of the most significant features of the Third Pillar, which came into being as part of the Treaty of European Union, is the so-called 'implementation gap' between the expectations and aspirations of the member states in this area and the empirical reality. This regularly features in the standard literature on the Third Pillar, yet there has been little detailed research done to either measure or determine the root causes of such an occurrence. Rather than simply accept that such a 'gap' exists, this thesis attempts to measure the implementation gap in two distinct areas of internal security co-operation. These are two of the most under-researched areas within the Third Pillar, namely the development of the European Police Office (and related elements of police cooperation) and progress in the related area of a European counter-terrorist framework. A model of 'perfect implementation' has been devised utilising tests from three distinct schools of decision-making - foreign policy analysis, the implementation school (which has its own distinct subset of literature) and European decision-making. By applying tests in relation to the establishment of objectives, the question of leadership, the scale of the 'sacrifice' made and a detailed analysis of the legislative output of each area, the thesis measures how close the reality is to the ideal. In terms of the nature of objectives, an examination of the clarity and consistency of such aims will be determined at two levels. The overall 'metapolicy' of the Third Pillar - the creation of 'an area of freedom, security and justice'- is compared to the current enlargement process, in order to determine both the meaning of such a concept and to ascertain where the priorities of the member states actually lie. Certain terms used within the European Union and replicated within the literature, such as describing such areas as 'matters of common interest', will be analysed to determine their meaning and their applicability to the empirical reality. As a result, and complimenting the 'Good Governance' initiative of the European Commission, which aims to determine the appropriate level for each of the competencies of the EU, the legitimacy of the European level of decision-making will be examined in each area. In terms of determining the root causes of the 'implementation gap', the solution most commonly offered - both by practitioners and in the secondary literature - relates to the process of communitarisation, which has already begun for the areas such as immigration and asylum and judicial co-operation on civil matters. Yet, in the case of the two case studies examined in this thesis - European police cooperation and the European counter-terrorist framework - communitarisation is not forthcoming, with little mention made of the post-Amsterdam elements of the Third Pillar in the draft Treaty of Nice. As such, the control factor of the institutional framework of the European Union does not apply as directly in either case study. Both have shared the same institutional structure since the inception of the Third Pillar, a structure that is likely to remain untouched by the process of enlargement. Therefore, there is a need to look beyond the potential panacea of communitarisation for other potential explanations as to why greater progress has been made in one area as opposed to the other.

This thesis considers the relationship between human rights and the principle of mutual recognition as applied in criminal matters. It examines the impact of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) on human rights and highlights the importance of human rights for the success of mutual recognition measures. Having embarked on the mutual recognition programme, on the basis of largely theoretical presumptions, an attempt by the EU to reposition human rights and to ensure that a genuine area of justice exists for all, can be witnessed through recent Directives on defence rights,. This research addresses the scope and method of human rights protection with focus on the implementation of the EAW. In the first part, mutual recognition and the EAW are defined. The second part considers the practical effect of the EAW on human rights, setting out the ECHR minimum standards and the extended EU scope. The third part evaluates the defence measures adopted to date by the EU under the Stockholm Roadmap. The final part summarises the main research findings which show that human rights are key to promoting mutual trust. The scope of some rights has already been extended and reinforced by the Charter of Fundamental Rights or the EU defence rights measures. The thesis argues that the best method for reinforcing these rights in practice is a tripartite collaborative approach between the EU, Member States and the Council of Europe. In order to address the tension between human rights and mutual recognition, work needs to continue beyond adoption of the Stockholm measures. It requires genuine commitment on the part of the EU institutions and Member States for the necessary amendments, adoptions, implementation and human rights protection to take place and be reflected in practice.

In this thesis I argue that there are qualities of literary writing which can illuminate human rights discourse and, specifically, its limit points. I focus on one such limit-point: the difficulty of fully possessing human rights. Rights are most likely to be securely guaranteed under the legal system of a nation-state. However, such rights – possessed on the basis of citizenship rather than through humanness – are not always considered human rights. The position of the nation-state, the possibility of legal enforcement and the category of the human are therefore ambiguities for the discourse. Literary texts from two countries which have been central to debates about human rights – Uganda and South Africa – will provide the focus for this study. Joseph Slaughter proposes that the plot of the Bildungsroman both resembles and promulgates the citizenship model of human rights-possession. However, in texts addressing the involvement of children in war in Uganda, I read experiments with the Bildungsroman form to indicate human rights discourse’s preoccupation with merely human identity. Child soldier narratives appeal to a decontextualized, universal image of the child, while in the fiction of Goretti Kyomuhendo there is an excessive repetition of familial language and symbol which throws the traditional narrative arc of the Bildungsroman off course. Critics including Slaughter see literature as compensating for the ambivalence of human rights discourse about the possibility of its own enforcement through the law. Instead, I explore the ways in which certain texts, in the context of South Africa, enact their own irreducibility to legal categories. I make this argument through a discussion of the way the literature and the literary appear in the Report of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission alongside readings of Antjie Krog’s Begging to Be Black and Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter and The House Gun.

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This thesis examines compliance with international human rights law in United Nations (UN) operations. It focuses on the provision of emergency humanitarian assistance, and on the assumption of administrative powers by the UN both de Jure (international administrations of territory) and de facto (refugee camps). It is argued that in these operations the UN has the functional capacity to have a direct impact on individuals and on the enjoyment of their fundamental rights. In part using case studies (the provision of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, the UN administrations in Kosovo and East Timor, and refugee camps in Kenya), it is shown that acts in violation of human rights have indeed been committed in the course of these operations. Although the UN is not itself a party to human rights treaties, various arguments are made to justify the applicability of international human rights law to the UN, and to its specialised programmes and agencies. Mechanisms - political, administrative, judicial and semi-judicial - for ensuring the accountability of the UN for violations of human rights are examined. However, existing mechanisms are largely inadequate. They neither offer remedies to the victims of the violations, nor impose sanctions on the perpetrators; their ability to modify future institutional conduct is also limited.

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“The Design of National Human Rights Institutions: Global Patterns of Diffusion and Strength” explores patterns of institutional design in the case of national human rights institutions (i.e. ombudsman, national human rights commission), seeking to understand why countries establish these bodies and give them certain mandated powers as reflected in their institutional design. The project answers two main questions about the global variation of institutional strength as a function of the design of these institutions: (1) What are the main global patterns of the institutional design of national human rights institutions? and (2) What explains variation in the institutional strength of national human rights institutions across borders? The project makes two main contributions to the scholarship on international organisation and cross-border diffusion: the dataset of institutional design features, which operationalizes and measures six different dimensions of an institutional design index on the basis of report-based and survey data, is the first global dataset of its kind. Institutional strength is the original dependent variable that represents an index of six design features, as a synthesis of main mandated functions: 1) de jure legal independence; 2) nature of the mandate; 3) autonomy from government control; 4) predominant de facto duties; 5) pluralism of representation; and 6) staff and financial resources. Institutional strength is a ranked categorical variable with three values (weak, medium, strong). An additional contribution is the explanatory framework, which derives a number of hypotheses about global and regional determinants of institutional design from four main mechanisms that draw respectively on domestic and international, as well as material and social, factors (socialisation, incentive-setting, cost & benefit calculations and domestic identity). The global analysis has found statistically significant evidence that participation in the United Nations-led peer-review process for national human rights institutions accreditation makes countries more likely to have stronger institutions. This is in line with recent work about the role of UN-led peer review processes and provides support for socialisation and acculturation explanations that are facilitated by a global network. At the regional level, social learning and acculturation across borders takes place in regions with high density of strong such human rights institutions (i.e. Europe and the Americas) and where more ‘early adopting’ countries are located. Countries with strong democratic identities, which established their human rights institutions prior to 1990, are both more likely to have strong institutions themselves and to motivate other governments to follow their lead. The analysis of global trends finds also that incentivesetting plays a role both at the global and the regional levels, as countries that receive higher amounts of Overseas Development Assistance from the United States or states that are subjected to EU membership conditionality are more likely to have stronger human rights institutions. The project follows a nested multi-method research design, which begins with a quantitative analysis of global trends as a backdrop for a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) focused on Europe, complemented by illustrative country institutional case studies. QCA finds two paths that are sufficient for European countries to establish strong institutions. Thirteen case studies present illustrative evidence of the QCA findings at the country/institution level.

Citizen orientations towards their political leaders, institutions and political systems sits at the heart of political science and political behaviour, yet despite the potential challenges distrusting citizenries pose for the operation and stability of democratic systems, there has been no consensus on what political distrust really is, what it means for the citizens that express it, what its implications are for political systems and how to best capture it across established democracies. The dissonance between empirical observations of citizen distrusting attitudes and the analytical concepts used to study political orientations, which have mainly focused on trust, make this the right time to ask “What is political distrust?” and to investigate how this attitude area can help social scientists better understand current phenomena of political behaviour across democratic systems. This thesis postulates that we cannot conclusively interpret the significance of plummeting trust indicators nor apprehend their consequences for democratic politics without a clear understanding of citizens’ political distrust, defined in its own right and separated from competing notions, such as cynicism or the lack of trust. The thesis follows a mixed methodological approach to the study of political distrust from the perspective of citizens. It develops a conceptual model for distrusting political attitudes based on theoretical work and novel empirical evidence from three European democracies – Italy, the UK and Greece. Our model conceptualises political distrust as a dynamic, relational and evaluative attitude that follows technical, ethical and interest-based assessments to judge the untrustworthiness of political agents. Further, the thesis puts this conceptual model to the test, creating a novel survey indicator and providing new quantitative evidence regarding the structure and operation of political distrust. It finds support for our conceptualisation of distrusting attitudes as retrospective and prospective evaluative judgments and highlights the prominence of perceptions of unethical political conduct in shaping political distrust. Using a multiple-item indicator tapping into evaluations of national parliament and a citizen’s preferred political party we explore the dimensionality and hierarchy of each evaluation and unravel a double operation of distrusting attitudes, both as specific assessments of political agents along these three dimensions and as a cognitive evaluative shortcut acting in a cyclical reinforcing manner. We also investigate how the newly identified aspects of political distrust relate to citizens’ behavioural intentions for participating in politics and find differences in the motivating and demotivating influence of distrusting attitudes targeted at different parts of the political system.