EU Human Rights Policy: A Comparative Study Involving the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia

The European Union's member countries share common principles, values, norms and culture. Therefore, the EU's common foreign and security policy is based on principles such as democracy, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law; also one of the main conditions for membership in the European Union is to comply with these principles. These principles are so important that the European Union emphasizes on binding them in its relations with other countries in various fields. For example, in the agreements concluded between the European Union and other countries, a clause related to human rights is incorporated. This means that the EU has conditioned its relations with other countries on respecting human rights. Despite the European Union's emphasis on respecting human rights, its behavior has been in practice incoherent and contradictory on the subject of human rights violations towards different countries; in this regard, the best example is EU's stances towards the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia on that matter.
The main question that this research intends to answer is: "What is the EU's human rights policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia?" The answer given as the hypothesis is that: "The European Union's human rights policy influenced by political, commercial and economic factors has been contradictory and discriminative towards these two countries.