On 9 June, the President of the Human Rights Council, H.E. Ambassador Nazhat Khan (Fiji), convened an informal exchange on the General Assembly’s review of the Council’s status, due to be conducted between 2021 and 2026. This was the first time Geneva delegations had had the opportunity to consider the ‘2021-2026 review’ since the summer of 2019, when it had …
The UN is calling on all countries to “build back better” from Covid 19 through placing economic, social and environmental rights and equality at the centre of all recovery efforts In Scotland a National Taskforce for Human Rights Leadership has published a Report containing 30 recommendations to do just that. The Scottish Government has accepted all of the recommendations and is …
On 4 June, Facebook declared that former US President Donald Trump’s suspension from their service will last at least two years, following the implementation of new enforcement protocols. These protocols are expected to have long-term effects on the presiding guidelines for content moderation and account suspensions for public figures. On the same day, Nigeria announced a nationwide Twitter ban after the platform …
In recent weeks, conversations about taxation seem to have moved out from the shadows of bureaucratic policy making and placed front and center of the international geopolitical stage. The reason in one word: COVID-19. However, while there is a growing momentum to establish a new international tax regime that addresses pervasive inequalities, accompanied by greater political will to discuss States’ …
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a plethora of uses, spanning from surprising and beneficial applications, like applying the same technology used to analyse pastries to identify cancer cells, to potentially detrimental and intrusive applications, like using facial recognition to track citizens. The European Union’s new proposal for a legal framework to govern AI suggests that the introduction of ethical, human centered regulations can both …
On 27 May 2010, addressing the Rome Statute Review Conference of the International Criminal Court in Kampala, Uganda, then-UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon heralded the ‘birth of a new Age of Accountability.’ More than a decade on, in the face of devastating conflicts and a global pandemic that has reinforced structural inequalities and led to a deterioration in the state of human …
Amidst the collapse of the public health system in India and an atmospheric rise in COVID-19 cases, social media platforms became ‘town squares’; centres of desperate coordination for supplies as well as outlets for growing frustration at the government’s failure to prevent thousands of deaths. The Government of Narendra Modi has in turn pressured social media companies to block posts and remove …
In his virtual address at the inauguration ceremony of the Generation Equality Forum 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron remarked that ‘no country in the world has yet achieved complete equality between men and women’. This observation crystallises the alarming state of gender equality almost 26 years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and the adoption of the landmark …
The Human Rights Council has long cast an outsized gaze at events in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and especially at the serious human rights violations committed by Israel, the occupying power. As of the end of 2020, the Council had adopted 70 resolutions on the human rights situation in the OPT, and held seven Special Sessions – far more than any …
On Thursday 27th May 2021, the Human Rights Council convened a Special Session to address ‘the grave human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem’. The Special Session was requested via an official letter dated 19 May 2021 and signed by H.E Mr. Khalil Hashmi, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Representative of Pakistan, and Coordinator of the Organization of …
