The rhetoric-perfomance gap of Italy’s human rights foreign policy

The paper analyses the consistency between Italy’s international commitments to human rights promotion and protection, and the country’s general performance in implementing rights domestically. The paper shows that, despite the country’s declaratory and institutional commitment in international relations tends to depict Italy as strongly oriented towards the advancement of human rights through a responsible support to the work of multilateral organisations, its performance to these ends is selective, primarily formal and increasingly inconsistent with its professed international reputation.