Alice Edwards, United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, offers her insights on evolving conversations around rationalising the Special Procedures system.
For decades, the United Nations’ system of independent human rights experts – known as the ‘Special Procedures’ – has been one of its greatest innovations for identifying abuses, developing legal standards, and giving victims a voice when domestic systems fail. It is also a system quietly failing the people it was built to serve.
Thousands of individual complaints sit unanswered in the UN’s online platform, a digital wasteland of lost hope and unmet human rights grievances. Governments often ignore communications altogether, or respond months or years later with formulaic denials. Few take the opportunity to address underlying problems. Mandate-holders themselves rarely have the capacity to follow up, effectively letting violators off the hook. Many mandate-holders are open to submitting fewer or shorter reports. Meanwhile, the system continues to expand, even as resources shrink and expectations rise.
Governments decide whether a Special Rapporteur or Working Group is allowed to visit. Securing an invitation can take years of lobbying – not about substance, but about reassurance. You explain, repeatedly, that you are independent, that you will be fair, that you will assess their situation objectively. Often, it makes no difference. Delaying tactics are routine. Some countries with so-called ‘open invitations’ have never received a visit; others have cancelled visits virtually on the tarmac of the airport runway. In parallel, countries willing to accept independent scrutiny are inundated with requests, while those that resist face few consequences. I’ve been told on multiple occasions that I am at the end of a long line of requests from other mandate-holders.
These visits offer opportunities for dialogue with authorities and civil society, impromptu inspections of prisons and other places where people are deprived of liberty, and technical recommendations. Countries that have received visits have generally found them beneficial to their own initiatives and reforms. Yet even when countries do agree, the question quickly becomes whether the visit can be funded at all. Today, funding covers just one visit per mandate. The scope of the mandate has not narrowed but the capacity to deliver it has; and that was even before the latest UN financial crisis.
The Special Procedures were never meant to function like this.
They were designed as a small, agile group of independent experts – academics, judges, and practitioners – appointed to investigate, advise, and report on specific human rights issues. Their value lies in expertise, and in the independence to speak plainly when others cannot. Today, that original design is buckling.
The system has grown dramatically over the past forty years. There are now more than seventy mandate holders, covering vastly different subject matters. At every session of the Human Rights Council, States seem to establish a new mandate. In practice, mandates created without proper funding quietly drain resources from those that already exist. Support staff, travel budgets, and administrative capacity are not expanded in parallel; they are redistributed. All mandates are left to do more with less.
States spend hours negotiating the resolutions that create or renew mandates. Every word matters. Some mandates – like mine – are explicitly empowered to investigate allegations, conduct country visits, and develop international standards. Others address specific or emerging issues that may require targeted – primarily normative – attention over a shorter period. Yet once created, all are placed into the same administrative box.
This flattening of differences has consequences.
The result is a distorted allocation of resources. Mandates receiving hundreds or thousands of individual allegations each year may have only one support staff – or less – to process them.
Mandate-holders are serving voluntarily, without pay, usually while holding other full-time positions. In reality, many work six days a week throughout the year and most dedicate time well beyond the 3-6 months’ commitment advertised. They also live in and work from all different time zones. The system rarely accommodates these realities, imposing rigid deadlines, and unrealistic turnaround times.
One of the clearest consequences of this misalignment is the breakdown of the communications system. Efforts to coordinate between mandates – intended to streamline engagement with States – have reduced the number of cases taken up, as time and resources are diverted to internal coordination rather than substantive action. Whether a case is addressed has become something of a lottery. This may simplify matters for governments, but it does little for victims who wait patiently for their case to be attended to, most never receiving any form of reply.
So, what could be done about these challenges? While I do not have a solution for the overall system except to encourage serious reforms (including rationalisation) that do not lose the value of the Special Procedures, I do have a bold proposal for the main human rights violations that intersect with my mandate.
That is, in short, to replace the current Working Group on arbitrary detention (WGAD) and the Working Group on enforced and involuntary disappearances (WGEID) with a new, consolidated working group covering intersecting mandates made up of five specialised Special Rapporteurs covering arbitrary detention (new), torture and other ill-treatment (existing), summary executions (existing), enforced and involuntary disappearances (new), and counterterrorism (existing). The Rapporteurs would retain their individual identity and mandates, but at the same time join together in a single working group to address communications and potentially some country visits. In particular, this new working group would take over the long-standing and highly-respected existing WGAD communications procedure, but its composition would change fundamentally. Instead of geographic representation, it would be made up of mandate holders with direct subject-matter expertise.
This would achieve five things:
- It would maximise the number of cases that can be pursued.
- It would allow cases to be assessed holistically, reflecting how violations occur in practice.
- It would ensure allegations are examined through relevant expertise and legal frameworks, rather than passed between mandates or more likely, not referred onto other mandates at all.
- It would reduce duplication and improve coordination.
- It would pool scarce resources, allowing a smaller number of well-supported experts to do the work properly.
To preserve thematic leadership, the disbanded WGAD and WGEID would need to be re-imagined as single rapporteurships, operating as the other mandates do today. The other existing mandate-holders would remain too. The result would be a strengthened collective mechanism for individual cases, and independent subject-matter rapporteurs focused on technical advice, thematic analysis, and norm development. Country visits – including shorter visits as outlined in my General Assembly report – could be carried out jointly through the working group and/or by individual mandates. That could expand the number carried out each year.
My proposal would reduce the number of experts from 13 to 5, yet it would not reduce focus on these specialised rights.
There is also a newer pressure the system has yet to acknowledge: reputational risk. In the social-media era, disagreement with a mandate-holder’s findings can quickly turn into public accusation, sometimes driven by governments or organised political campaigns. Earlier generations of experts did not face this reality. Mandate-holders must also confront challenges of being surveilled (including online), and deal with the threat of being arrested or sanctioned. Today, all of these factors must be absorbed as part of the role, without guidance or protection.
And yet, for all its flaws, the system works when it is allowed to, and when States engage collaboratively with them. Special Procedures have helped shape international law, clarified prohibitions, and driven real policy change internationally, regionally, and domestically. They have helped secure release from unlawful detention, improved conditions and treatment, and obtained reparations for survivors as well as rehabilitation for families. They have raised alarms early, often when others have stayed silent.
That is why fixing the system matters. The answer is not simply more mandates, nor fewer. It is smarter design. Resources should follow function. Mandates with heavy caseloads need adequate support. Not all mandates need ten-day country visits, and not all require the same tools. My proposal for consolidation, outlined in this paper, could also be considered or inspire other changes;[1] likewise shorter and time-bound tenures may be appropriate for certain mandates.[2]
Ultimately, States must decide whether they truly want the system to work. Their actions, not their rhetoric, will show how seriously they take human rights. Independent expertise remains one of the UN’s greatest assets. It should not be allowed to fail through neglect, congestion or lack of imagination. The system can be fixed, but only if it is allowed to change.
Alice Edwards has been the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment since August 2022. She is the seventh person in the role and the first woman.
[1] For example, one could envisage environment, climate change and toxics could be combined into a single rapporteurship. It is noted that special rapporteurs on contemporary forms of slavery and trafficking in persons were recently combined.
[2] Mandates covering such matters as (for example) leprosy, albinism or older persons could be time-bound mandates (1-3 years maximum) with the view to their recommendations being integrated back into relevant United Nations agencies and programmes.
Featured image: Alice Edwards, Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment inspecting prison in Chile on official country visit (2023).
Share this Post
