The United Nations’ top human rights body is facing a test. Its outcome will have major implications for its credibility. This October, the Human Rights Council (HRC) might readmit Russia, which it suspended just more than a year ago, as a member. At the opening of the next UN General Assembly session, all 193 UN member states, including 54 African states, …
September will mark one year since Volker Türk’s appointment as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, after his predecessor, Michelle Bachelet, chose not to continue for a second term (no High Commissioner has served out two full terms). It is fair to say that the choice of Türk, widely predicted by UN insiders due to his close relationship with the …
For the past decade, the Human Rights Council has, at regular intervals, grappled with the question of how to make its work more efficient, including through the rationalisation of initiatives, mandates, general debates, and panels, and through ‘technical fixes’ such as reducing speaking times. These efficiency drives have tended to come as a consequence of sporadic yet growing concern that …
On 20 April, the Human Rights Council convened an intersessional meeting to review the effectiveness of its work under agenda item 10 on technical assistance and capacity building, and to seek ideas from States and civil society on how the Council might strengthen the effectiveness and impact of that work in the future In other words, is the Council effectively …
The 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be celebrated on 10 December, 2023. It is timely to look back at human rights project at the start of the UN and to reflect on where it should go next. In 2005 the World Council of Churches (WCC) published a remarkable book by John Nurser, For All Peoples …
A message from the 17th President of the Human Rights Council, H.E. Ambassador Václav Bálek (Czech Republic) The most ratified human rights treaty in the world, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, stipulates that adulthood begins at the age of eighteen. During the Czech Presidency, the Human Rights Council enters its 17th year. Therefore, in the spirit of the …
In a newly released report, Human Rights and the Security Council: A Relationship in Need of Thoughtful, Creative and Constant Cultivation , published by the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights @JBI_HumanRights, its author, Joanna Weschler, argues that despite the difficult political dynamics at present, the Security Council still has an impressive range of tools, working methods and practices at its disposal that – if used creatively and with ongoing attention – can …
Since 2017, Georgia has tabled resolutions under agenda item 10 of the Human Rights Council with the aim of increasing international scrutiny of the human rights situation in the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, occupied by Russia since 1991-1993. Today, however, OHCHR reporting mandated through those resolutions, as well as Council debates held in response to the reports, …
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) …
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 …
