The United Nations and Human Rights

A Guide for a New Era

Julie A Mertus, Julie Mertus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134008018
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Julie Mertus' highly acclaimed text continues to be the only completely up-to-date comprehensive yet succinct guide to the United Nations human rights system.

Today, virtually all UN bodies and specialized agencies are undertaking efforts to incorporate the promotion or protection of human rights into their programs and activities. The United Nations and Human Rights examines these recent initiatives within the broader context of human rights practice, including the promotion of individual rights, management of international conflict and the advancement of agendas of social movements.

The fully revised and updated second edition not only provides a complete guide to the development, structure and procedures within the UN human rights system, but also reflects the vital changes that have occurred within the UN system, devoting considerable attention to expanding the range of issues discussed, including:

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• new developments in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

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• the current controversy surrounding the new Human Rights Council

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• expanded treatment of economic and social rights.

A superb addition to any human rights syllabus, this book maintains its position as essential reading for students and practitioners of human rights, international relations and international law.

1
A guide to the new UN human rights practice

This book owes a great debt to human rights scholars and practitioners who have written earlier guides to the UN human rights system. Without their contributions to the field this book could not have been written. This account, however, departs considerably from traditional approaches to the study of the UN human rights system, both in content and in methodology. It includes many topics and actors not often considered in an introductory guide, and offers familiar topics under a new organizational structure. This book proceeds from a new orientation to the UN to human rights practice more generally. Why the difference? The evolving content of human rights, the growing diversity of actors of the UN human rights system and the changing nature of human rights practice reflect a shift in the way in which the UN human rights system has tended to address human rights challenges.

What is the new UN human rights practice?

Nearly all guides to UN human rights practice focus on the work of UN treaty and Charter-based bodies and procedures. According to these models, monitoring and reporting of violations of civil and political rights occupy the central field of advocacy practice for the international human rights movement. New issue areas do arise, but they “are either ushered into the methodological fold of the mainstream movement, or face obstacles to their integration.”¹

This book presents a much more varied and expansive view of UN human rights practice that more accurately reflects the reality of post-Cold War activity. Human rights complaint procedures and reporting under the treaty and Charter-based bodies remain important for human rights enforcement. Marginalized groups seeking the imprimatur of legitimacy within the mainstream human rights community continue to push for new treaties reflecting their concerns. In many respects, UN standard-setting remains a crucial concern, especially for those who have not yet had input into the process. To a large extent, however, the UN human rights system has in fact moved from standard-setting to implementation of human rights policies through institutionalization and enforcement. Many of these new measures are controversial and will continue to be contested as the precise content of UN human rights practice evolves over time.

In addition to making treaties more effective, UN human rights practice today is taking on a broader mandate. Human rights practice is likely to address human rights education programs for police officers and soldiers, projects to combat trafficking in women, efforts to limit the use of child soldiers, electoral assistance, and other field-oriented, in-country endeavors. Contemporary UN human rights practice speaks to concerns once deemed to be the province of other fields, such as development, humanitarian and refugee affairs, trade, labor or security. In exceptional cases, the UN also has indicated a willingness to sanction the use of military force to address human rights violations. Vigorous human rights enforcement would not have been possible during the Cold War.

Efforts to promote human rights-based advancement of economic and social development have also received particular attention in the post-September 11 climate. In the past, development organizations often sacrificed human rights in the name of development, in an “instrumentalist quid-pro-quo that saw human rights as a deferrable luxury of rich countries.”² Today, however, many development organizations—including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)—have publicly embraced the integration of human rights in their work, often with the explicit goal of addressing the underlying tensions that provide fertile ground for terrorist acts.³ At the same time, some states have reacted to September 11 by retrenching and regressing on human rights, violating the civil liberties of their citizens of Middle Eastern ancestry, torturing Afghan and Iraqi prisoners under the purported cloak of human rights, and threatening journalists with arrest should they not reveal their sources in cases that would ordinarily attract little attention.

These developments have been accompanied by new attempts to hold non-state actors, including paramilitary troops, NATO forces and transnational corporations, accountable for human rights abuses. The foundational international instruments of the international human rights framework, namely the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,⁴ the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,⁵ and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,⁶ focus on the need to protect individuals from abuse by state authorities. Moreover, although these documents ostensibly place all civil and political rights (such as the right to a fair trial and freedom from torture) on an equal footing with economic, social and cultural rights (such as the right to education or health care), greater attention has been paid by most Western governments and NGOs to civil and political rights. This orientation has been reconsidered in recent years with an increasing realization that non-state actors, groups and organizations can also be responsible for atrocities and that economic wrongs may be as grave and as in need of redress as civil and political abuses committed by state actors.

Drawing on these developments, the organization and composition of this book reflect a broader and deeper human rights practice than guides to the UN have traditionally offered. It begins its discussion of the UN human rights system with a review of the work of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the focal point for all UN human rights activities since its establishment in 1993. The High Commissioner’s extensive involvement in technical assistance projects in country and field offices reflects a shift in UN human rights practice from monitoring of violations to the building of institutions and capacities to facilitate compliance. This book does contain separate chapters on contemporary practices of the OHCHR Charter and treaty-based bodies, but, breaking with tradition, the text begins with an extended treatment of the OHCHR. This reflects the OHCHR’s central and ever-expanding coordinating and operational role in the UN system. Unlike many introductory guides to the UN human rights system, this book also includes information on UN affiliated and associated organizations (such as the UNDP, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR)) and separate chapters on the human rights practice of the Security Council and the International Labour Organization (ILO). While this text does not aim to address every new human rights practice area, it provides a more comprehensive overview of the field for practitioners and students wishing to assess the human rights system today.

Where does UN human rights work happen?

The answer to this question used to be easy. Simply put, UN human rights practice used to happen where the name plate on the door said “human rights.” So, human rights were almost entirely contained within a limited set of specific human rights bodies. This is no longer the case. Today, virtually all United Nations bodies and specialized agencies, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are undertaking efforts to incorporate the promotion or protection of human rights into their programs and activities. To be sure, these endeavors invite criticism. For starters, many of the employees of these organizations that are confronting new human rights mandates have limited training on human rights. Nonetheless, one could argue, by bringing their own experiences and perspectives to bear on human rights problems, they offer the possibility for new solutions. This book provides examples of how human rights are currently becoming diffused throughout the UN system. Pockets still exist in which human rights can be ignored, but progress has been made nonetheless.

Even as it focuses on the international system, this book recognizes that the international human rights system addresses behavior that occurs at the national level. As human rights activist Scott Long observes:

Some people speak of “international human rights” as though it were a single word, as though the rights cannot be talked about separately from the international framework. But rights do not begin at the international level. They begin with local problems and local lives, with individuals who realize their dignity has been injured, and strive to imagine remedies and solutions.⁷

Not only are violations experienced locally, but durable solutions to long-term human rights abuses can only be found at the local level as well. The international human rights system would fail without domestic implementation of human rights.⁸ As Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed, “Since respect for human rights is central to the legitimacy of the State order, human rights should be nurtured locally by branches of government, national human rights institutions and civil society.”⁹ In light of the increased attention devoted to human rights at local levels, this book includes information on the involvement of UN human rights bodies in the establishment and strengthening of national human rights institutions, the creation of national action plans, and civil society capacity-building.

Who are the actors?

The variety of actors involved in UN human rights practice has expanded tremendously. States still remain central to the human rights system. Without state commitment to the domestic implementation of human rights, the system will fail. Today more than ever, states both invoke human rights concerns to justify foreign policy decisions and defend their own domestic policies on human rights grounds. However, public authority on human rights practice has now shifted beyond the state to intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. This book captures this trend by incorporating information on NGOs (a heterogeneous group) throughout the text (instead of pushing it into a separate chapter as in many books) and by including more information on the diversity of UN actors addressing human rights concerns.

The strategies and tactics of human rights NGOs have changed dramatically in recent years. Mainstream Western human rights organizations have tended to work through a particular methodology according to which human rights violations are named and perpetrators publicly identified, so as to become shamed into compliance. This methodology employs public campaigning involving such techniques as letter writing and public acts of condemnation. The efficacy of this approach has developed as the technical expertise of the “watchers” has improved and as communications technology has advanced. Additionally, NGOs have adopted new techniques that have proven to be extremely effective at influencing government leaders and UN officials. In contrast to the technique of public shaming, these new efforts often involve private meetings and cooperative information sharing, the provision of concrete policy proposals, and offers of technical assistance.

Moreover, included on the agenda of many of the newer human rights organizations is a broader array of human rights issues, including economic, social, and cultural rights. The traditional model of investigation and public exposure of misconduct that is effective in cases involving state responsibility for violation of civil and political rights will probably not be as effective in cases involving economic and social rights where there is unlikely to be “relative clarity about violation, violator and remedy.”¹⁰ The violations of economic, social, and cultural rights are difficult to address, both because of their often diffuse nature, and because affected populations often experience communal violations, rather than individual abuses of rights.

The new human rights advocacy reaches beyond the state as duty-bearer and violator of human rights, targeting also international financial institutions (IFIs), transnational corporations, trade regimes and other institutions. Among other methods, “new rights advocates” tackle issues of social justice and call into question the international practices that weaken states’ capacity to meet social and economic rights. As Paul Nelson and Ellen Dorsey have explained, “this approach often seeks to weaken, not draw on, the influence of international organizations and powerful governments, and tends to involve NGOs in more complex relationships with poor country governments, relations that are sometimes adversarial, sometimes supportive.”¹¹ Not all of these new efforts concern the UN human rights machinery and thus, while acknowledged, are not explored in this book.

Another development in human rights practice concerns the extensive involvement of human rights organizations in technical assistance projects in country and field offices. This trend reflects a general shift in international human rights practice from the monitoring of violations to the building of institutions and capacities to facilitate compliance. Especially in the post-September 11 climate, there is more urgency than ever to include victims in human rights program design and implementation. In traditional accounts of human rights, victims are passive recipients of the wisdom and good work of human rights NGOs and benevolent diplomats. The new focus on field-oriented, in-country human rights programs, however, must rely on human rights victims becoming active, empowered participants in human rights practice. National systems that are imported from outside, with little local input, are designed for failure. This book argues that a more participatory approach will necessarily be a more effective means of promoting and protecting human rights.

Organization and goals of this book

This book is part of a series on international organizations designed to be a resource for practitioner and student alike. All of the books in the series seek to provide comprehensive and current information, while also remaining clear and concise. From interviews with both international relations and law students and human rights practitioners in preparation for this book, the need to include specific, interesting examples of UN human rights practice became clear. However, given the space limitations, not every detail of every procedure could be reviewed, nor could every UN body or UN affiliate addressing human rights issues be covered. Students did not want to be bogged down in procedural detail, but at the same time they hoped for a book that could help them imagine a potential role for themselves in the UN human rights system.

To make the human rights process more tangible, this book includes primary documents, such as complaint forms and UN reports and the text provides specific illustrative case examples. Ultimately, the book seeks to provide meaningful engagement with the UN human rights system as it operates in practice. Historical and political content is provided throughout, but readers seeking further information are advised to consult the readings and Web resources listed in the Selected Bibliography, and the directory of UN bodies and affiliated organizations in the Appendix. Having read the text, students and practitioners will be bet...

Table of contents

• Routledge Global Institutions
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword to the second edition
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 A guide to the new UN human rights practice
• 2 The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
• 3 UN Charter-based bodies (and other non-treaty bodies)
• 4 UN treaty bodies
• 5 The Security Council
• 6 The International Labour Organization1 and the UN Global Compact
• 7 Conclusion
• Postscript to the second edition
• Appendix
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Index