The spread and variety of the EU's involvement in human rights issues around the world reflects the widely different nature of its relationships with the countries of the developing and advanced world and, it has to be admitted, the preoccupations or strategic interest of the member states.
So it is that Slovakia and Latvia in Europe have seen their applications for accession to the EU put on hold pending progress on the treatment of political and linguistic minorities.
In China, human rights policy takes second place to "constructive engagement". But a multi-million pound EU village democracy programme trains local administrators in how to consult, and eminent judges visit Beijing to give courses on the rule of law.
Some £200 million has been spent through the European Development Fund between 1992 and 1997 in areas linked to democratisation and supporting civil society.
Forty per cent of the cash has been spent strengthening popular consultation processes. The spending ranges from training for elections, monitoring, preparing electoral rolls to strengthening the legal system and training administrators and programmes aimed at rooting out corruption.
But an EU-funded report by an "eminent persons group" which included the UN human rights commissioner, Mary Robinson, was recently sharply critical of what it saw as the lack of coherence and co-ordination of the EU's human rights policy.
The report acknowledges the Commission has played a "vital, constructive and often innovative role in supporting human rights and democracy initiatives, providing funds for election support and observation and ensuring humanitarian assistance".
And it points to the growth since it was established in 1994 of the budget line for "democracy and the protection of human rights" from £54 million to a current £80 million in 1998. The scale of such spending, which does not include salaries of EU officials, dwarfs the total budget of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of approximately $22 million.
But the report points to what it sees as three problems: the lack of a proper legal base for human rights activities in development, fragmentation of responsibility, and lack of staff expertise.
The Commission acknowledges the legal base problem but rejects criticism of its system of human rights co-ordination. The report argues that the Commission's co-ordination group, drawing on representatives from 19 separate offices, reflects an unhealthy and incoherent division of responsibilities.
It urges the establishment of a separate human rights agency as well as the appointment of a specific commissioner for human rights.
"The lack of co-ordination is thus associated with inefficiency, fragmented policy responses, unclear lines of responsibility, an inability to develop the necessary expertise, the marginalisation of Parliament, and a general lack of transparency," the report says.
Far from it, says Francesca Mosca, of the Commission's Development Directorate. She says the co-ordination works well and the spread of representation is its strength.
The report's analysis completely misunderstands the philosophy of the Union's human rights policy, she argues. The challenge is to imbue all policy with a human rights dimension, and the setting up of a separate human rights agency drawing the EU's human rights staff together, away from individual directorates, would undermine such mainstreaming.
Human rights must not be ghettoised, she says, arguing that every development project potentially has a human rights/democracy dimension.
Such an approach has been incorporated into the revision in 1995 of the agreement the Union has with the 70 other Lome countries of the Africa-Carribean-Pacific group.
If countries are prepared to use part of the funding of their agreed EU programmes to bolster human rights, civic awareness, and institution-building, the Union will provide extra resources from a special £54 million fund to bolster such work.
In the renegotiation of Lome that is currently underway the Commission hopes to strengthen that approach.