Human rights experts in the United Nations: a review of the role of United Nations Special Procedures

Abstract

In the realm of human rights, the use of experts is widespread, especially within the United Nations (UN) system of human rights. This practice is probably due to what Christopher McCrudden has described as: ‘The inevitably compromised, often ambiguous, usually open-ended nature of the legal texts advancing human rights [which] are the site of debates at the international, regional and national levels over their meaning and implications.’ His chapter on mainstreaming human rights was partly based on the concept of epistemic community, as defined and developed by Haas. According to McCrudden:"The debates about the extent to which human rights should play a central role in government decision-making can be seen to involve a clash of two different epistemic communities: one involving primarily professional administrators, and one involving those primarily with a human rights perspective. The latter often regard including the former in human rights interpretation as dangerous."These findings led McCrudden to point to the limits of mainstreaming human rights and to assert the need for involving human rights experts in the implementation of human rights, instead of leaving this to experts in other areas, such as trade law. By analogy, McCrudden’s argument applies to the UN Special Procedures for Human Rights. The international human rights experts that operate within these Special Procedures interact with professional administrators or politicians, who are not necessarily human rights experts, in order to further the realization of human rights and thus operate within the tension signalled by McCrudden. Kofi Annan, the then Secretary-General of the UN, in a speech to the UN Human Rights Council in November 2006, also pointed to the tension between distinct epistemic communities in the context of the realization of the rule of law. While referring to the Special Procedures as the ‘crown jewel’ of the UN human rights procedures, Annan observed that: ‘It has . . . been recognized in theory, and increasingly also in practice, that the rule of law cannot be left to the discretion of governments, no matter how democratically elected they may be.’