On 11 October 2022, the UN General Assembly (GA) in New York convened to elect new members of the Human Rights Council for the term 2023-2025. As soon as the votes were cast and members elected, diplomats and civil society representatives, as always, began to ask themselves whether the newly composed Council (which will sit from 1 January next year) …
Quick summary The 51st regular session of the Human Rights Council (HRC51) was held from Monday 12 September to Friday 7 October 2022. With Ms. Michelle Bachelet’s mandate as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights having come to an end on 31 August 2022, and the incoming UN High Commissioner, Mr. Volker Türk, not taking up his official functions …
What would a comprehensive analysis of the voting record of African states at the UN Human Rights Council look like? The question isn’t easy, but we hope that the answer DefendDefenders and AfricanDefenders formulated will quench the thirst of those—diplomats, human rights advocates, or mere Council observers—who pay attention to the African Group… or worry about its voting patterns. As African human …
The summer of 2022 will be remembered by many as the time when the effects of climate change became for them all too real: water scarcity, droughts and desertification, loss of habitats and displacement due to wildfires , growing health conditions and deaths as a result of record-breaking heatwaves , displacement and destruction of housing and infrastructures due to record flooding . However, while these impacts are …
Opinions have already begun forming about Volker Türk in the short time since the announcement of his appointment last week as the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. However, in the absence of a public competition, there was little opportunity to learn about Türk. He is also not well-known outside of the UN (and had few followers on twitter …
Social media, digitalisation, datafication , AI , internet access , surveillance capitalism and the vast powers of tech companies have all become issues of critical concern for the human rights community. In the debate, we often focus on the newness of the evolving challenges. However, it may be worthwhile to take a step back and note that the nexus between human rights and tech …
Quick summary The 50th regular session of the Human Rights Council ( HRC50 ) was held from Monday 13 June to Friday 8 July 2022. The Human Rights Council marked its 50th session through a high-level interactive discussion that provided stakeholders an opportunity to reflect on the achievements made and the lessons learned since its 1st session ( concept note – video ). On …
On July 1 2022, during the 50th session of the Human Rights Council, which opened on June 13 2022, an urgent debate was convened on ‘the human rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.’ The urgent debate was requested in an official letter from H.E. Mrs. Lotte Knudsen, Permanent Observer of the European Union, and H.E. M. Jérôme Bonnafont, Permanent …
Against a background of the retreat of human rights worldwide, growing doubts about the ability of the international community to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, growing inequalities, and the ecological and climate crises, on Human Rights Day 2021 (10 December) the French Development Agency (AFD) organised an international conference on ‘Human Rights and Development.’ It brought together …
In February 2018, I published a blog on the early departure of the previous High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. The blog responded to David Petrasek’s article in OpenGlobaRights entitled ‘Another one bites the dust’ (8 February 2018). The article attempted to look past Zeid’s stated reasons for leaving his post (in effect, that the worldwide retreat from human …
