Between learning and schooling: the politics of human rights monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review

Abstract

This paper explores the politics of monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a new United Nations human rights monitoring mechanism which aims to promote a universal approach and equal treatment when reviewing each country’s human rights situation. To what extent are these laudable aims realised, and realisable, given entrenched representations of the West and the Rest as well as geopolitical and economic inequalities both historically and in the present? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the UN in 2010–11, the final year of the UPR’s first cycle, we explore how these aims were both pursued and subverted, paying attention to two distinct ways of talking about the UPR: first, as a learning culture in which UN member states ‘share best practice’ and engage in constructive criticism; and second, as an exam which UN member states face as students with vastly differing attitudes and competences. Accounts and experiences of diplomats from states that are not placed in the ‘good students’ category offer valuable insights into the inherent contradictions of de-historicised and de-contextualised approaches to human rights.

Keywords:

• human rights monitoring
• United Nations
• audit culture
• diplomacy

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the help, argument and inspiration of Roland Chauville, Charles Gore, Adil Hassan Khan, Emma Larking, Louiza Odysseos, Jean-Claude Vignoli and three anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Alston, “Reconceiving the UN Human Rights Regime”; and Gaer, “A Voice not an Echo.”

2. United Nations Human Rights Council, “HRC Res 5/1 on Institution-Building,” UN Doc A/HRC/Res/5/1, Annex, para 3(g).

3. Cowan, “The Universal Periodic Review”; and De la Vega and Lewis, “Peer Review in the Mix.”

4. Strathern, Audit Cultures. We have analysed UPR as a ‘public audit ritual’. See Cowan, “Before Audit Culture”; and Cowan, “The Universal Periodic Review.” On the micro-practices within the Secretariat, see Billaud “Keepers of the Truth.”

5. Li, The Will to Improve.

6. Domínguez-Redondo, “The Universal Periodic Review.”

7. For insightful discussions of these processes within development projects, see Mosse, Cultivating Development; Li, The Will to Improve; and contributors to Müller, The Gloss of Harmony.

8. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Academy which funded the research project, “International Human Rights Monitoring at the Reformed Human Rights Council: An Ethnographic and Historical Study”, October 2010–September 2011 (BR100028). The information presented here draws on participant observation, interviews with UPR participants (diplomats, NGO representatives, Secretariat staff) and analysis of documents.

9. Cowan, “The Universal Periodic Review”; and Cowan, “Before Audit Culture.”

10. Some changes in the modalities have been introduced for the second cycle (2011–15), as discussed later in the article.

11. Members of the Human Rights Council had three minutes, Observer States had two minutes, but if the number of states wishing to speak was high – as frequently happened – the president would declare a two-minute limit for all states.

12. Marks, “Human Rights and Root Causes.”

13. FIACAT, Universal Periodic Review, 15; and Tomuschat, “The Universal Periodic Review,” 622.

14. This trend was even more noticeable during the second cycle of the UPR.

15. Tomuschat, “The Universal Periodic Review,” 619–620.

16. FIACAT, Universal Periodic Review, 9. For Cuba’s February 2009 review there were 326 stakeholder submissions; for its May 2013 review there were 454 submissions. For the October 2011 review of Venezuela, Cuba’s close ally, there were 571 submissions. To put these figures in perspective, Colombia’s December 2008 review had 25 submissions and its April 2013 review 24 submissions.

17. Anghie and Chimni, “Third World Approaches,” 86.

18. Burke, Decolonization. See also Chatterjee, “Empire and Nation Revisited”; and Moyn, The Last Utopia.

19. Sen, The Universal Periodic Review, 38.

20. ‘UN language’ refers to the accepted ways of speaking in the UN context. It is distinct from the six official UN languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese), all of which were used in the UPR Working Group, with simultaneous translation always provided. English was, nonetheless, the dominant language within the UPR Working Group and at side events and informal meetings.

21. According to one Geneva-based NGO representative, diplomats from Russia, Cuba, Egypt and India ‘are very often smarter and more capable than many EU diplomats’; we also heard praise for Chinese diplomats. See also Heins et al., “A West Divided?,” 9.

22. Abebe, “Of Shaming and Bargaining,” 2.

23. Heins et al., “A West Divided?,” 8.

24. This polarisation was already noticeable during the negotiations related to the Institution Building Package that set the rules of the UPR. See Abebe, “Of Shaming and Bargaining,” for more details.

25. See, for example, FIACAT, Universal Periodic Review; McMahon, The Universal Periodic Review; and UPR-Info.Org, Analytical Assessment.

26. Cowan, “The Universal Periodic Review,” 62.