Before Spring 2022, only the real connoisseurs of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were familiar with the so-called Moscow Mechanism enabling any OSCE participating State to request the establishment of an ad hoc expert mission to investigate specific questions related to the OSCE human dimension. In the first thirty years of…

Introduction When, in 1991, the Participating States of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CBSE) at their meeting in Moscow established the so-called Moscow Mechanism, nobody could have anticipated the pivotal role that this mechanism would have some three decades later in holding to account its “country of origin”, the Russian Federation. Yet, this…

The Optional Protocol to the UN Torture Convention (OPCAT) is unique amongst the UN human rights treaties and their Optional Protocols. Unique as it is not normative because it does not set out a new right which would be additional to those elaborated in the Torture Convention itself. Nor is it purely procedural as it…