by John Burley, Formerly UNDP; Office of the Director-General; UNCTAD between 1972-2004.

Part one Almost exactly a hundred years ago today, the Paris Peace Conference adopted the Covenant of the League of Nations and appointed the British diplomat Eric Drummond as the first Secretary-General. The choice was fortuitous. In this article, which will be split into two parts, I will seek to explain how Drummond built the first-ever independent international civil service, and how that service was tested by the League’s administration of the minorities treaties. I will also show how, eventually, the international civil service transitioned, after the Second World War, between the League’s minorities regime and the new United Nations’…

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by Dr. Alice Edwards, Head of the CTI Secretariat

Guiding States on how to prevent and respond to torturous forms of abuse of power or position is what the UN Convention against Torture is all about. Yet, despite torture being long condemned and the prohibition recognised as a jus cogens international norm, there continue to be grave abuses perpetrated in many countries and in all regions. In others, lack of safeguards or systems can lead to incidents, and if not guarded against, could spiral into patterns of unacceptable behaviour. No State or region is immune from such excesses; and all States have something to learn and share about how…

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by URG-NYC Team

This post is the second in a series of blogs produced by the URG-NYC team to take stock of the implementation of the UN reforms, which were adopted in the past 18 months, and provides an update on perhaps the most opaque series of reforms: changes to the UN management system. Objectives All of the reforms are intended, to varying degrees, to modernise the UN, to streamline and increase the efficiency of its work, and prioritise delivery of services at the country level. This is particularly evident in the reform of its management architecture. The management reforms are about modernising…

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by Nicolas Agostini, Representative to the United Nations for DefendDefenders

In September 2018, the Human Rights Council adopted resolution 39/22, on ‘Technical assistance and capacity-building to improve human rights in the Sudan.’ No one should be fooled by its title: this latest iteration of the Council’s Sudan-focused resolutions was, in the words of Human Rights Watch, ‘an abdication of the Council’s responsibility to human rights victims in Sudan while grave violations are ongoing.’[1] It marked a sad, yet logical, conclusion to years of resolutions that failed to reflect the gravity of the situation on the ground. From civil society’s perspective, resolutions on the situation in Sudan have been among the…

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