Human Rights Council

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The ‘scandal’ of foundation support for UN human rights Special Procedures

August 30, 2021

In July 2021 the European Centre for Law and Justice published a report entitled The Financing of UN Experts in the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. It is based on anonymous interviews and anonymous quotations, said to reflect interviews with 28 past or present Special Procedures mandate-holders. It purports to expose the links that many independent experts working at the international level have with the Open Society Foundations (OSF), established and funded by George Soros, or have received grants from OSF or the Ford Foundation. The author of this post is one such expert. These are among only a handful of private foundations in the world that provide such support. The report argues that foundation funding is often aimed at guiding the actions of the mandate-holders, “or even framing and controlling it,” thus undermining their independence. The report does not bother going into the question of causal effect, or putting the funding into its broader contextual setting. Nor does it pay any attention at all to the far larger…

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Climate Change in the Human Rights Committee

February 18, 2020

  The environment and climate change are amongst the most pressing issues for human rights. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has called it “the greatest threat to human rights” and fifteen children submitted a communication before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in September. Even though it seems…

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An Independent Mechanism for Myanmar: A Turning Point in the Pursuit of Accountability for International Crimes

October 1, 2018

Last week, the Human Rights Council voted to establish an “independent mechanism” to collect, consolidate, preserve and analyse evidence of violations of international humanitarian law and human rights in Myanmar. To those following international efforts to bring perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide to justice, this watershed moment could herald a paradigm…

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Should Commitments to Implementation Factor into Elections to the Human Rights Council?

November 8, 2016

Following the recent celebration of the UN Human Rights Council’s tenth anniversary, one of the key questions for its next decade is how it can play a more effective role in promoting the implementation of human rights standards and norms and its own and other UN bodies’ recommendations. This shift is critical given the serious deficiencies in implementation,…

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First Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy to the Human Rights Council

March 18, 2016

In March 2015, the United Nations Human Rights Council created a new special procedure on the right to privacy, appointing its first Special Rapporteur on the topic, Professor Joseph Cannataci, in July 2015. Last week, the Special Rapporteur presented the Human Rights Council with his first report and engaged in an interactive dialogue with the Council.

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