The task of the provisions in EU law providing free movement to workers is to tackle national rules that hinder movement. Rules obstructing entry and settlement of migrant workers and their families have to be removed or disapplied. As seen from the opening extract, the European Commission study found no evidence of benefit tourism. This chapter explores three specific themes in relation to the full exercise of free movement of EU workers. First, it will explore the definition of a worker – who gets to enjoy the privilege of an international career in the EU? Is the movement from one state to another an EU norm as it is in the United States? Second, what is the level of transnational solidarity for the economically active, and how does national action help or hinder this? Finally, what situations do not attract the protection of Article 45 TFEU – when can member states undermine the creation of an internal labour market? However, before looking at these themes in detail, the Treaty provision and related secondary law providing rights to the employed will be fully set out.

Law-making is perhaps the most important function in a democracy. Laws regulate the content of products as well as behaviour and relationships of both the state and individuals. However, as important as the rules themselves is that they are followed. It is not just the rules themselves that are important but how they are made, for this secures their credibility. Laws need to be fair, clear and comprehensible and in addition made according to procedures that are seen to be legitimate. Legitimate procedures must underpin rule-making if laws are to be considered credible by the populace who must follow them. This chapter will explore the typology of laws made in the EU and the procedures by which they are made. The chapter begins with an exploration of the law-making procedures themselves, looking at the different procedures for legislative and non-legislative measures. It then sets these within the regulatory environment of the EU to discuss the democratic deficit and a potential alternative. Finally, it analyses the EU law-making environment from the perspective of Lani Guinier’s concept of an ‘electocracy’ – when viewed through this lens, does the EU look more legitimate?

This book is concerned with what a human rights perspective means for social workers, noting that social work has a tradition of human rights that exceeds 100 years (Staub-Bernasconi 2016). Framing social work as a human rights profession has certain consequences for the way in which social work is conceptualised and practised. In many instances, such a perspective reinforces and validates the traditional understandings and practices of social work, while in other cases it challenges some of the assumptions of the social work profession. The position of this book is that a human rights perspective can enhance social work and that it provides a basis for social workers to achieve their social justice goals, regardless of the setting. In this chapter some of the issues and problems associated with human rights will be discussed, and the implications of these discussions for social work will be highlighted.

In terms of human rights practice, the field has mostly been the province of lawyers, who are widely regarded as the main human rights professionals, though a social work literature on human rights has recently begun to emerge (Solas 2000; Reichert 2007). Most edited collections of articles on human rights, and journals dedicated to human rights, are written and edited by lawyers, and the law is commonly seen as the primary mechanism for the safeguarding of human rights and the prevention of human rights abuses (Beetham 1999; Douzinas 2000). The emphasis has been on legislation and on human rights treaties and conventions, and much of the literature is concerned with their analysis and implementation (Mahoney & Mahoney 1993). Many countries have human rights commissions, whose membership consists largely of people with legal training, and which operate in a legal or quasi-legal way, for example by hearing complaints and making judgments that have legal force.

The previous chapters, in exploring various aspects of human rights and the implications of seeing social work as a human rights profession, have touched on many important practice issues in relation to social work. The issues are not new. Ethics, social control, the place of policy and advocacy, professionalism, the role of expertise, linking the personal and the political, cultural relativism, need definition, empowerment and so on are all familiar and are frequently contested within social work. In the preceding chapters, however, they have arisen not out of a consideration of social work per se but rather out of a discussion of human rights and the possible implications of a human rights approach to practice. Various social work practice principles emerged from these discussions, and the purpose of this chapter is to bring these together in order to derive an overall picture of human rights-based social work. This will be done around three organising themes: theoretical foundations, empowerment and contextual/universal issues.

The concept of human rights represents one of the most powerful ideas in contemporary discourse. In a world of economic globalisation, where individualism and becoming rich are seen as the most important things in life, and where at the same time the formerly secure moral positions for judging our actions seem to be reverting to a postmodern relativism, the idea of human rights provides an alternative moral reference point for those who would seek to reaffirm the values of humanity.

One of the major criticisms of conventional human rights discourse, largely confined to civil and political rights, has been that it has concentrated on the protection of human rights and the prevention of human rights abuse only in the public sphere (Clapham 1993; Bröhmer 1997; Ratner & Abrams 1997). The very idea of ‘civil and political’ rights implies that rights are about the capacity to engage freely in the structures and processes of civil society and the body politic. The fact remains, however, that for a large proportion of people across the world it is not in the public or ‘civil and political’ domain where human rights are threatened or denied and where it is necessary for human rights to be promoted and protected. It is in the private or domestic sphere that, arguably, the greater human rights violations occur and where there is most need for social work practice to seek to redress abuses. The chapter will therefore not only consider the human rights of vulnerable groups but will also use these considerations to identify a number of important theoretical and practical issues that apply to any examination of human rights and social work practice.

The previous chapter dealt with ways to realise and protect human rights through social work practice. This chapter, by contrast, focuses on social work practice itself – it is the processes, rather than the outcomes, of social work practice that are of concern here. If social work is a human rights profession and aims to meet human rights through its practice, it is essential that the profession itself operate in such a way that its own practices observe human rights principles and do not violate the human rights of others. The important principle throughout this chapter is that we respect other people’s human rights by allowing them maximum self-determination and control over the situation in which they find themselves. This principle can be applied to the practice of social work. While social workers have always been committed to the principle of client self-determination, this has often applied to the life of the client rather than to the practice of social work itself and to the way social work practice is constructed by social workers.

The discursive view of human rights, emphasised throughout this book, suggests that human rights must be understood as an ongoing and ever-changing discourse about what it means to be human and about what should comprise the rights of common global citizenship. If this is the case, it is most important to examine the nature of that global dialogue. Who is responsible for maintaining that discourse, who contributes, who does not, and whose voices are the most powerful in defining what is to count as ‘human rights’? As discussed in Chapter 1, one of the consequences of globalisation has been localisation, and this has led to the identification of the global and the local as the sites of significant change and praxis. For this reason, the discussion in this chapter will be divided into a consideration of global and local dialogues around human rights.

One of the important characteristics of a profession is that it should have a code of ethics (Corey et al. 2011). Social workers have long considered ethics an indispensable aspect of their practice, and many national social work associations have codes of ethics to which their members are required to adhere. Social work is no different from many other professions in this, except that the importance it gives to values means that social workers are probably more immediately conscious of the ethical aspects of their practice than are some other professionals. Certainly, social workers spend a good deal of time talking about ethics, establishing and revising codes of ethics, and consciously dealing with ethical issues confronted in practice. The very nature of social work practice, dealing as it does with conflicting values and the making of difficult moral choices on behalf of society, means that ethical dilemmas will be part of the practice of every social worker (Clark 2000). Codes of ethics are not only used to encourage ‘ethical’ behaviour on the part of social workers and to assist social workers who are confronted by difficult ethical dilemmas.

There are two views one can take on the timeliness of the idea of human rights. One is that it is an idea whose time has come. This view sees human rights as being a necessary counter to economic globalisation and asserts that, in the globalised world, ideas of global citizenship based on ideals of human rights are important in the same way as ideas of national citizenship rights became important with the emergence of the nation state. It suggests that the apparently increasing interest in a human rights discourse is a source of hope for a future based on collective understandings of shared human values rather than individual greed and consumption. Human rights can be the basis for a future of humanity that until now has seemed an impossible dream. The other view of human rights is that it is an idea whose time has passed. This view sees human rights as a leftover remnant from the disappearing world of modernist certainty and Western imperialism. In the postmodern world of relativism, multiple voices, fragmented realities and the ‘death of the meta-narrative’, there is no room for, and no point in, a universal discourse such as human rights.