Of Shaming and Bargaining: African States and the Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations Human Rights Council

Abstract

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations Human Rights Council promises to be a useful tool for examining human rights situations in states in an objective, non-selective, universal and transparent manner. It is an undertaking imbued with a shift from the former Commission’s policies and practice of shaming to a new consensual and cooperative model of human rights evaluation. The experience of African countries, both during the negotiation over its normative and institutional framework and in the two sessions of the Working Group on UPR, lays bare the challenges to the new human rights body and its unique peer review mechanism. The article critically examines the participation of African countries in the UPR and highlights some of the issues that deserve, at this early stage, the attention of all those who mind to see the objectives of the UPR fully realised.