This report explores the role of the EU as a human rights promoter, including its ability to monitor and control the legitimacy of the use of human rights justifications by state actors. Broadly, the EU’s activities in human rights governance can be described in three layers. First and most obviously, the EU is able to act vis-à-vis its Member State as a supranational power. This role includes the issuing of legislation and other regulatory acts aimed at ensuring the enforcement of fundamental rights in and through national law, but also the exective and judicial control, through the Commission and the EU Court of Justice (CJEU), of the Member States’ compliance with Union law, most importantly with the Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR). Second, the EU acts on the international scene as a subject of international law through agreement with (mostly) states outside the Union. These agreements may have as an objective or a condition to ensure the enforcement of human rights, and they are also subject to the scrutiny of the CJEU to ensure that the international agreements themselves are compatible with primary EU law including the CFR. Third, a growing literature has observed that the EU also acts as a global or extraterritorial actor, exercising power over third countries through the extraterritorial reach of its internal, unilateral legal measures – often itself using human rights justifications to legitimise its influence. These three roles will be examined in the following.