ABSTRACT
The 2008 Report by the European Council on implementing the European Security Strategy (ESS), five years after it was adopted, is the first explicit and official reference to human security as a guiding theme behind the EU’s security thinking. Human security was first proposed as the most appropriate approach for the EU’s foreign and security policy by the 2004 Barcelona Report of the Study Group on European Security Capabilities (now the Human Security Study Group). Since then it has become an objective of the European Commission’s approach to security, specifically on issues such as non-proliferation, and small and light weapons (Ferrero-Waldner 2005, 2006). In 2008 the European Parliament also proposed – and in a close vote, narrowly rejected – formally adopting many of the provisions of the Barcelona Report (European Parliament 2008). The ESS Implementation Report represents a further step towards human security, incorporating some of the language of the Human Security Study Group’s 2007 Madrid Report.
