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

In part one of this blog post, which can be read here, I described the origins of the independent international civil service, created in 1919. I also highlighted the importance of the adoption, as part of the overall Treaty of Versailles, of a set of treaties on minorities (i.e. the minority treaties). Part two will look at how the secretariat of the League administered the minority rights provisions of these treaties and how that experience fed into the building of the secretariat function of the United Nations (UN). A recently published book,[1] co-authored by four former UN officials, has thrown…

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by Marc Limon, Executive Director of the Universal Rights Group

In early May the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, undertook an important mission to Cameroon, a country beset by serious human rights challenges especially in the context of unrest and violence in the west and north of the country. That a High Commissioner would undertake an urgent visit to a country facing a situation of serious human rights violations is not, of course, surprising in of itself. What was noteworthy, however, was Bachelet’s approach to the visit and tone of the press statement she issued at its conclusion. Both emphasised the importance of cooperation between the Cameroon…

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by Avery Davis-Roberts, Associate Director of the Democracy Program at the Carter Center

In 2018 alone, more than 100 electoral events took place around the globe, including in the United States where an estimated 113 million registered US voters turned out to cast ballots in a highly contested mid-term election. This year, elections will take place in every region of the world, including in two of the most populous nations, India and Indonesia. The US is an outlier. Unlike most of the elections held in other parts of the world, the US mid-term elections were not widely observed by international elections observers. Large numbers of nonpartisan citizen elections observers did not deploy to…

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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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