Rosa Freedman

New Mechanisms of the UN Human Rights Council

The United Nations Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to universally protect and promote human rights. Failures of the Councils predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, had been attributed to politicisation and bias. In order to overcome these and other Commission failings, two new mechanisms were created to assist the new body with fulfilling its mandate. Universal Periodic Review provides a mechanism for examining the human rights records of all UN Member States during a four year cycle. Special Sessions enable the Council to deal with grave human rights crises as they occur. However, these mechanisms have been used by States and regional groups to achieve political aims. This article examines these mechanisms in order to assess whether the Council is adhering to its founding principles and whether it is effectively protecting and promoting human rights.

Public Awareness of Human Rights: Distortions in the Mass Media

The mass media decisively shape global perceptions about human rights, yet fail to reflect the realities of global violations. Situations of egregious abuse are often overshadowed by those which receive attention for reasons extraneous to any specific concern for human rights. Distortions in established media sources arise not necessarily from deliberate misrepresentation, but from the inevitable disparities that arise when human rights abuses are reported as by-products of military, economic, or other interests. This study examines day-by-day coverage of global human rights, during the three-month period from October to December 2006, in two American and two British broadsheets: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Financial Times. The aim is to understand the kinds of factors which, albeit tangential to violations of fundamental human rights, nevertheless influence both the quantity and the quality of reporting. While various editorial pressures, such as the need to focus on topical stories, are not denied, it is argued that the news media must make greater efforts to achieve proportionality between the gravity of human rights situations and the degree of coverage those situations receive.

UN-Accountable? A response to Devika Hovell

Devika Hovell has provided an excellent call to arms for academics to move beyond the question of whether the United Nations has due process deficiencies: By now we all know that it does. She invites us to focus instead on making “the normative case for adopting due process safeguards in UN decision making,” insisting that until now scholars have failed to ask the important theoretical questions underpinning their policy research. Hovell uses two case studies to demonstrate why resort to judicial mechanisms ought not to be the answer when seeking to find ways to ensure due process. She first focuses on targeted sanctions and then turns attention to cholera in Haiti.

Supporting or Resisting? The Relationship between Global North States and Special Procedures

Scrutiny of the relationship between Special Procedures and States typically focuses on mandate holders’ independence and expertise, as well as the impact of their work ‘on the ground’. Global South countries have been criticised for ignoring visit requests, resisting recommendations contained within reports, and seeking to undermine Special Procedures by introducing new, vague mandates on subjects not traditionally viewed as falling within the human rights matrix. Little attention, however, has been paid to the relationship between Global North States and Special Procedures. This chapter will interrogate the relationship between those countries and mandate holders, individually, and the system more broadly. The research will demonstrate that while Global North States typically have supported Special Procedures mandates – through sponsoring, promoting or voting for them as well as through financial contributions – they tend only to engage fully with mandates where the focus is on civil and political rights or on certain categories of vulnerable groups. Using four case studies – the UK and adequate housing, Canada and food, the EU and migrants, the US and poverty – we shall explore the ways in which Global North States often resist and undermine particular mandate holders’ activities. Analysis will focus on the reasons for that resistance, which challenge the principle of universality of human rights. In particular, we shall highlight the ideological divisions that remain, despite Global North States paying lip service to the indivisibility of human rights. As well, we shall document the increasingly frequent political attitude of many Global North States who insist that, considering their human rights record, they ought not to be visited and criticised by Special Procedures mandate holders, who should rather concentrate their energy on States with much worse human rights records.