While it is laudable of the EU to show a concrete commitment to human rights outside its borders one cannot help thinking that the decision to remove Sri Lanka’s preferential trade agreement over the government’s refusal to implement human rights conventions will merely worsen the situation of those the EU is attempting to protect.

The removal of Sri Lanka’s special trade status with the EU, as part of the GSP Plus programme, will undoubtedly hit the nation’s poor the hardest. A long time criticism of trade sanctions has been that they affect ordinary much more seriously than they do a country’s political elite. Take for example Iraq, where trade sanctions can be seen as having directly contributed to the rise in infant mortality rates as well as the general downturn in the standard of living for the average Iraqi.

While nowhere near as draconian as those levied against Iraq, the removal of Sri Lanka’s special trade status will undoubtedly have an effect on the average Sri Lankan. Increased taxes on imports to the EU from Sri Lanka will simply cause Sri Lanka to become yet another client state, reliant on international aid and tourism with an uphill struggle to further develop its industry.
In much the same way as many African nations have been damaged by tariffs, as well as by the dumping of excess production by the EU, Sri Lanka’s economic growth will be further stunted as it emerges from a civil war that all but destroyed the nation.
Economic development is a necessary part of the development of a stable democracy, the kind of democracy that will be able to ensure that human rights are respected. Indeed, empirical evidence shows that the more developed a nation, the more stable and, crucially, less violent, a democracy becomes. Stunting economic growth in the country now can only have a negative effect on the country’s human rights regime.

Human rights exist to protect the individual from the state, unfortunately, in this instance, the EU seems to be the state that individuals in Sri Lanka need protecting from. The EU, formed primarily as a free trade area must embrace free trade on a global scale in order to foster the changes it wishes to see in the rest of the world.