The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism was one of the main innovations introduced by UN member states at the time of the creation of the Human Rights Council in 2006. The first cycle of this global review mechanism saw all 193 UN members have their human rights records reviewed by their peers and receive recommendations for improvement. There was broad …
On October 21st the UN General Assembly held its annual election for seats on the Human Rights Council. A total of fifteen seats were available across the UN’s five regional groups, with the candidates and results shown in the table below (those elected in bold). The new members will start their three-year terms on 1st January 2015. In the African …
When in March 2005 former Secretary General Kofi Annan proposed in his report “In larger Freedom: toward development, security and human rights for all” the creation of the Human Rights Council to address the “credibility deficit” of the Commission on Human Rights, the aim was first and foremost to “create an organ that would be better placed to meet the …
…or at least, it did. In the early 1950s, as diplomats in New York sat down to negotiate what would become the two international human rights covenants, Syria’s delegation to the General Assembly’s Third Committee was in the vanguard of efforts to arm the UN’s human rights machinery with stronger implementation mechanisms to ‘pierce the veil of national sovereignty’* that …
Imagine waking up one morning to be told by a man from the government that new laws mean the street your family has lived on for generations is being sold to developers. Your land is to be ‘converted’ into flats in the name of national economic development; bulldozers will soon be moving in to flatten your house and rip up …
Wednesday 19th March 2014, Geneva The United Nations’ (UN) independent human rights experts – otherwise known as ‘Special Procedures’ – are considered by many to be, in the words of then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the ‘crown jewel’ of the international human rights system. From their first appearance in 1967 when the Commission on Human Rights established an Ad Hoc …
Improving the effectiveness of Human Rights Council resolutions is one of the Universal Rights Group’s current projects, and in that regard we are pleased to have contributed, through our empirical and qualitative research, policy dialogues, and side events with delegations from all regions and political groups, to the delivery of the following consensus based cross-regional statement led by Norway and …
United Nations resolutions, short documents designed to present the will of the international community, are a basic building block of the work of the human rights system. Each session of the Human Rights Council ends with state diplomats voting on a raft of new resolutions covering a variety of thematic or country-specific issues. In preparation for this moment, those same …
It is fair to say that the results of the latest Human Rights Council elections came as no surprise to most observers. This is not because the winning States had engaged in more dynamic and compelling campaigns than their opponents. Rather, in three of the five regional groups, the number of candidates exactly equalled the number of vacant seats, making …
In January 1941, the late President FD Roosevelt delivered a speech which led to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration with the late Sir Winston Churchill which contained their vision of a peaceful world order after the war. This new world order was to rest on four pillars,trade and finance, on the one hand peace and human rights on the …
