For more than a decade, the European Union has been aiming to establish itself on the international stage as a ‘normative power’, i.e. an actor who relies on a values-based foreign relations agenda in order to build up soft power. This stance has been doubted by some which have seen in it an unrealistic and arrogant moral posture in the current international environment, while others have praised a clear and much-needed commitment to universal human rights standards binding on all states but far from being effective. This commitment is now enshrined in various articles of the EU Treaties (see e.g. 2, 3, 21 TEU). However, the EU has been faced with numerous challenges in the realization of its commitment and the promotion of its values-based agenda, to the point that we might ask the question whether the EU’s soft power is now in crisis. This panel, which is composed of contributions drawn from the large-scale EU-funded FRAME Project on ‘Fostering Human Rights Among EU Policies' (www.fp7-frame.eu), will examine these challenges from a variety of angles: the faltering leadership of the EU in multilateral settings, the current EU migration crisis, the disappointing results of trade conditionality for human rights, the difficulties in implementing a rights-based approach to development, and the coherence issues permeating the EU human rights agenda across the board. All papers will present the perceived causes of the EU’s challenges in the fields considered and offer concrete recommendations in this regard.