How time matters in the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review: Humans, objects, and time creation

Kathryn Mcneilly

doi:10.1017/s0922156521000169

Abstract

AbstractThe Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations Human Rights Council is an innovative monitoring mechanism in the international human rights law system. As the UPR matures, scholars have increasingly sought to stand back and understand it as a process. In this article, I take work in this vein further by considering more closely the actors involved in the UPR – humans and objects – and highlighting the time creating effects that emerge from the relationships between them. Across the various stages of the UPR, a range of temporalities – from cyclicality and linearity to retrogression and suspension of time – are produced and sustained by people, reports, data, lists, microphones, screens, computers, action plans, and desks, just to name a few. I argue from this that time is materially made in the review process, often in micro and taken for granted ways. In its operation, the UPR appears as a collection of temporal assemblages. Or, in language drawn from actor-network theory (ANT), an assortment of fluid and interweaving sets of actants networked together who generate ideas of time across its practice. Apprehending time creation in this material, the ANT-inflected way is highly significant for scholars and practitioners interested in the UPR. It holds potential to influence how this process can be understood, approached, and located within international human rights law as itself a larger, time creating actor-network.

Highlights

As a visitor to the Swiss city of Geneva, one soon learns that time is central to its history
This rich tradition is visibly celebrated in the city in landmarks such as l’horloge fleurie, a five-meter-wide clock face made of flowers which change with the seasons, and l’horloge du Passage Malbuisson, a clock featuring 16 bronze bells that chime each hour alongside 42 animated figures
This forecloses that the future may not follow in such a linear and progressive way from the past and present, and how this may lead to the need for a more fluid and open understanding of the future to be integrated into the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process

Summary

Introduction

As a visitor to the Swiss city of Geneva, one soon learns that time is central to its history. This includes the question how this mechanism can be understood anew – as relational and productive – and, potentially, approached differently through more thoughtful engagement with objects and addressing the limitations of dominant temporal flows created by actants It includes how the UPR may be apprehended as one node linking into wider actor-networks generating time in the international human rights law system more broadly. I seek to look anew at the UPR via the lens of a combined ANT and law and time perspective, highlighting how and where diverse networks of actants produce time within its process To undertake this investigation, the discussion to follow is broken down into the four stages of the process noted earlier: collation of information on the human rights record of the SuR; the UPR Working Group sessions; adoption of the final report at the Human Rights Council Plenary; and follow-up to the review. Rather than taking a grand form, these temporalities are often micro in nature, generated in routine interactions, and are frequently naturalized to the point that they might be missed or taken for granted

Stage one Collation of information on the human rights record of the SuR

Stage two

Stage three

Stage four

Why should time mattering in the Universal Periodic Review matter?

Conclusion