Human rights and social welfare pathologies: civil society perspectives on contemporary practice across UK jurisdictions – critical analysis of third cycle UPR data

Paul Chaney

doi:10.1080/13642987.2020.1789107

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study uses discourse analysis of the critical views expressed in the corpus of United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review (UPR) submissions by civil society organisations (CSOs), in order to explore how the UK, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland governments are responding to their international human rights treaty obligations in the formulation and delivery of social policy. Developed from Hogwood and Peters’ work on the pathology of public policy, the analytical framework investigates CSOs’ critical framings of the disorders, progress and challenges related to social policy-making in the UK. The findings show a raft of shortcomings including a poor monitoring and enforcement, gaps in social protection and discrimination. The original contribution this study is threefold: 1. revealing the nature of prevailing rights violations in the UK; 2. outlining the territorial narratives and contrasts between jurisdictions in the wake of devolution; and 3. showing how the systemic nature of rights violations can be conceptualised using Hogwood and Peters’ theory of public policy making pathologies.

Highlights

This study uses discourse analysis of the critical views expressed in the corpus of fifty individual submissions by civil society organisations (CSOs) to the Third Cycle United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review (UPR) covering the period 2012–17,1 in order to explore how the UK, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland governments are responding to their international human rights treaty obligations in the formulation and delivery of public policy.[2]
Whilst a leading human rights index ranks the UK sixth out of 159 countries in terms of human freedom[177] and the Human Rights Council’s third cycle UPR report concluded that, the UK is ‘committed to complying with its international human rights obligations’[178] and that ‘progress had been made since its last Universal Periodic Review in 2012, in several areas’;179 the present analytical framework reveals manifold failings in the way human rights are addressed in the policy process
The significance and uniqueness of the findings lies in the fact that this is the only extant case study to take a systemic view of the nature of human rights violations and social policy-making across polities in a devolved UK

Summary

Introduction

This study uses discourse analysis of the critical views expressed in the corpus of fifty individual submissions by civil society organisations (CSOs) to the Third Cycle United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review (UPR) covering the period 2012–17,1 in order to explore how the UK, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland governments are responding to their international human rights treaty obligations in the formulation and delivery of public policy.[2]. These are first set out in the section entitled ‘Pathologies in Social Policy-Making across the UK’ which concentrates on analysing CSOs’ UPR submissions This is followed by ‘Key issues and challenges in relation to rights implementation in England/UK-wide, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’ – which analyses CSOs’ discourse and UN and NHRI reports in each polity. As Leanne Cochrane and Kathryn McNeilly’s insightful account of the first cycle review notes: it serves to highlight many of the concerns that are of contemporaneous interest to human rights groups and the public and, it allows significant stakeholder engagement in the preparation of the UK government’s UPR report to the UN.[45] Yet, as the following analysis reveals, key challenges presciently identified in relation to the first review hold true today: namely, the speed and extent to which government addresses earlier UPR recommendations

Methods

Discussion

The UK has signed and ratified seven UN treaties

Findings

Notes on contributor