NGOs invite attention: From the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to the Human Rights Council

ABSTRACT

This article first reviews and compares Human Rights Council and University Period Review (HRC/UPR) research published during and shortly after the institution-building period (2006–2009) to more recent work (2010–2014) to identify patterns of scholarly interest in NGO roles and behavior at the HRC/UPR. It divides research into that which either “ignores” NGOs or offers “indirect” attention, “direct” attention, or “foregrounds” NGO activity, concluding that NGOs are surprisingly underexamined, given remarkable new participatory opportunities in the HRC/UPR and the centrality of NGO information provision to the success of the new body. Empirical analysis of NGO statements from the CHR to the HRC indicates sharply increasing NGO participation, particularly among domestic, regional, and Southern NGOs. The increased volume and changing characteristics of participating NGOs may have important effects on the HRC/UPR and should also encourage further analysis.

Funding

Byungwon Woo's research is supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2016.

Notes on contributors

Laura K. Landolt, Associate Professor of Political Science at Oakland University, examines US and UN aid to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for democracy and human rights, and NGO human rights advocacy in the MENA and at the United Nations. Her research has been published in Third World Quarterly, Global Society, Democratization, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and Human Rights Review. Byungwon Woo is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Language and Diplomacy at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and specializes in international relations, international political economy, and international institutions. His research has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Asian Women, Economics & Politics, International Interactions, International Studies Quarterly, Korea Observer, and Political Science Research and Methods.

Notes

1. Replication data can be found at the Journal of Human Rights (JHR) Dataverse. Landolt, Laura; Woo, Byungwon, 2015, “Replication Data for: NGOs Invite Attention: From the UN Commission on Human Rights to the UN Human Rights Council,” https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/4OWQTP, Harvard Dataverse. NGO written statements at the CHR and HRC can be found at: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/gmainec.aspx. The dataset compiled from NGO written statements at the CHR and HRC is in the JHR data archive at Dataverse. International, regional, and domestic nongovernmental organizations are described as “NGOs” in UN documents. We follow this convention and make distinctions where necessary.

2. Indirect attention is measured by nine or fewer mentions of “NGO” or a related word in the primary text (not including section headings, descriptions of institutional rules involving NGOs, or NGO as sources of information in the main text or information about NGOs in footnotes). Similarly, direct attention is measured by 10 or more mentions of “NGO” or a related word, while articles that “foreground” NGOs mention “NGO” or a related word more than 10 times and take them as a primary analytical focus.

3. The research examined here is peer-reviewed, published between 2006 and 2014 (the last complete year), takes the HRC or UPR as a primary focus (usually indicated by title) and is in English. There are a large and growing number of chapters in edited volumes, journal guest columns, conference papers, theses, dissertations, and NGO-sponsored research, but these works are beyond the scope of this article. To facilitate comparability, we also exclude books but encourage attention to them (Sen 2009, 2011; Ramcharan 2011; Bassiouni and Schabas 2012; Freedman 2013b; Charlesworth and Larking 2015). All works were located in multiple Google Scholar searches using key terms, including “Human Rights Council” and “Universal Periodic Review,” by tracing all authors who cited located articles, by searching for works cited by located articles (snowball method), and by requesting assistance in locating additions to the evolving bibliography from multiple scholars identified in it.

4. IR scholars sometimes publish in law journals, and legal scholars sometimes publish in “other/IR” journals. To simplify, we count IR scholarship as that which appears in a journal with a title that does not contain “constitutional,” “juridical,” “law,” “legal,” or similar terms in the title. Not all publications in these “other” journals are IR, but we generalize to simplify discussion.

5. The first UPR round occurred from 2008–2012, and the first UPR article is dated 2007.

6. Other NGO activities include standard and agenda setting, mobilization of public opinion in favor of IGO activities, and legitimizing IGOs.

7. The inflated model is suppressed and not reported here.

8. Among interesting recent quantitative work examining NGO targeting strategies, Baekkwan Park finds that NGOs that “rely on indirect sources of information are more likely to focus on states with strong domestic civil societies and to shame those states more harshly than [NGOs] that collect information directly on the ground” (2014: 1).