Belgium and the European Commission will host the 12th Annual EU-NGO Forum on Human Rights in Brussels. It will be centred on the topic, “EU Human Rights instruments and the Lisbon Treaty: State of play and way forward”.

Last year, the Lisbon Treaty came into force and brought substantial changes to the EU's action in many ways. The Lisbon Treaty strenghtens the EU's own commitment to human rights and confirms the promotion and protection of human rights as a key objective of the EU's external action.

Four specific topics have been chosen to illustrate in a concrete manner the general theme of the EU-NGO Forum on Human Rights in workshops:

• The EU Human Rights instruments in the fight against the death penalty.
• The role of the EU in the promotion and protection of economic, social and cultural rights.
• The EU's relation with regional human rights mechanisms, including the Council of Europe, the OSCE, the African Union, the ASEAN or the OAS.
• The consistency between the EU's internal and external Human Rights policies in the context of the Lisbon Treaty.

The EU-NGO Forums are organised annually, and usually bring together around 150 delegates, mainly from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from all over the world, international experts and representatives of EU institutions and member states.

The purpose of the EU-NGO forum is to provide opportunities for civil society representatives from the global South to meet and exchange experiences with EU representatives and human rights experts

The conclusions and recommendations of the forum will be presented at the Working Group of the Council on Human Rights (COHOM).

Also in the framework of Lisbon Treaty, official talks on the European Union's accession to the ECHR (European Convention of Human Rights) have recently started