The Universal Periodic Review and peace agreement implementation: conceptualising connections, challenges, and ways forward

National human rights institutions have become a salient feature of national and global human rights architecture. Although scholars have paid much attention to their general relationship with the United Nations, it is surprising that very little has been written on how this has reflected in the Universal Periodic Review as the UN’s only peer-review human rights mechanism. This article aims to contribute to filling this gap. Firstly, the article presents original data on the frequency and regional distribution of national human rights institutions’ participation in the first two Universal Periodic Review cycles. Besides reporting, the author identifies a plethora of other entry points and offers recommendations on how national human rights institutions can maximize their impact on the Universal Periodic Review outcome. Secondly, this article explores if national human rights institutions have been the objects of Universal Periodic Review recommendations. Have the Member States advocated for the establishment and strengthening of national human rights institutions through the Universal Periodic Review or not? Have national human rights institutions been high on Member States’ (foreign) policy agendas? How have the States under Review responded to recommendations to establish national human rights institutions? The implications of these empirical questions are discussed in the context of human rights compliance and norm diffusion literature. The article argues that while having some features of ‘rights ritualism’, the insistently cooperative and inclusive character of the Universal Periodic Review facilitates a genuine discussion of existing human rights situations. This has a real potential to lead to human rights policy changes over time through the process of acculturation, which is demonstrated with the example of national human rights institutions-related Universal Periodic Review recommendations.

How does government ideology, measured by the ideology of the chief executive and the ideology of the largest government party, influence the implementation of civil war peace agreements? In this study, I address this research question by analysing the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) dataset that covers 34 comprehensive peace agreements of 31 countries from 1989 to 2015. The results of feasible generalised least squares (FGLS) regressions demonstrate that the likelihood of implementing peace agreements increases when chief executives and the largest government parties of the left-wing are in office. In contrast, the likelihood of implementing peace agreements decreases when chief executives and the largest government parties of the right-wing stay in power. Consistent with the party-policy literature and the hawkish-dovish assumptions, I find that left-wing governments positively impact the implementation of peace agreements more than right-wing governments, indicating the statistically significant relationship between the government ideology and the implementation of peace agreements.

Reviewed by: Human Rights and the Universal Periodic Review: Rituals and Ritualism ed. by Hilary Charlesworth & Emma Larking Edward McMahon (bio) Human Rights and the Universal Periodic Review: Rituals and Ritualism ( Hilary Charlesworth & Emma Larking eds., Cambridge University Press, 2014), 314 pages, ISBN 978-1-107-08630-2. I. INTRODUCTION In recent years it has become de rigueur to associate human rights with universal values. This, however, masks the reality that the devil is in the details in defining such hot-button terms as universality and human rights, and determining how the latter can best be supported. It is, nonetheless, possible to map an emerging continuum of actions the international community can take to promote universal human rights norms of conduct. In descending order of magnitude of intervention these can include a) the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine relating [End Page 249] to humanitarian intervention; b) targeted sanctions; c) naming and shaming; and d) international organization norm-setting, including peer reviews. Peer reviews consist of member states assessing the performance of each other according to a commonly defined set of criteria. This process is increasingly being used by international organizations and includes such initiatives as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Peer Review, the African Peer Review Mechanism, and the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process of the UN Human Rights Council. Certainly in comparison to R2P, peer reviews contain much lower costs for all concerned. Human rights-related peer reviews are designed to be a regular part of state-to-state interactions and generally deal more with the “lesser” sins of autocratic rule and lower level human rights violations. For a variety of reasons, R2P is best left sheathed to the maximum extent possible.1 By contrast, peer reviews represent a more user-friendly methodology. Both risks and short-term rewards are of a lesser magnitude. However, if properly used, peer reviews can have a prophylactic effect. Peer review mechanisms can expand international human rights and democracy norms by mainstreaming them. They have the potential to enmesh states within the spider web dynamic of heightened respect for universal human rights norms and reduce the number of future instances requiring higher cost interventions. Peer reviews are voluntary in that governments agree to participate in them. They scrutinize the domestic affairs of states, blunting the traditional concept of sovereign independence; by having made the decision to be part of them, governments have agreed to open matters in their countries to international scrutiny.2 Governments are increasingly coming under pressure from international financial institutions, international organizations, fellow governments, and domestic public opinion to participate in peer reviews. Standing aloof now carries a stigma that governments have something to hide or are otherwise seeking to keep authoritarian tendencies from public view. This can have deleterious effects on aid, trade, and other aspects of bilateral and multilateral relations. Peer reviews can also empower domestic voices in favor of human rights promotion and protection by providing tangible evidence of the interest of the international community in these issues, and, by spotlighting these human rights defenders, provide a protective shield for their activities.3 They pose the possibility to, over time, shift the debate and create a “new normal” in terms of international standards of domestic political behavior. International organization peer review mechanisms are by definition creations of the member states of the organization undertaking them. They thus have in common a tendency to be the products of a lowest-common-denominator consensus decision-making process. This in turn means that they almost invariably rely more on the carrot of positive reinforcements and inducements rather than the [End Page 250] stick of punitive measures. Due to their voluntary nature, peer reviews can thus fail to achieve meaningful goals while providing the appearance of action, reflecting an “emperor wears no clothes” scenario. II. RITUAL, RITUALISM, AND THE UNIVERSAL PERIODIC REVIEW It is against this ambiguous backdrop that Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking provide an edited collection of papers considering the UPR, which began functioning in 2008.4 The UPR is a process operating in four and a half year cycles; each year the human rights performances of forty-two UN member states are examined by...

Canada, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and Universal Periodic Review

ABSTRACTNorth Korea’s participation in the UNHRC’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR)—a peer review in which states make recommendations to one another for improving human rights implementation—is a notable exception to its rejection of other human rights mechanisms. What explains North Korea’s willing participation in the UPR? This essay analyses North Korea’s participation in the first (2008–11) and second (2012–15) UPR cycles through its written submissions, responses to recommendations, and recommendations to other states. It finds that North Korea has consistently accepted weak recommendations, rejected more specific policy changes, and implemented accepted recommendations on a limited basis, allowing it to claim compliance with human rights at minimal cost. The UPR’s reliance on states’ self-reports and its inability to adjudicate competing factual claims allow North Korea to reject claims of egregious abuses, openly advocate for a radically state-centric vision of human rights, and challenge the legitimacy of human rights mechanisms like the Commission of Inquiry and Special Rapporteur while building support from other states with similar views. Notably, the Commission of Inquiry appears to have motivated North Korea to increase its cooperation with the UPR, demonstrating that the UPR complements but cannot replace other UN human rights mechanisms.

Over the past two decades, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has started to take action to promote human rights. This shows that the DPRK authorities have accepted the idea of human rights, at least in principle. In addition, the DPRK government, which has ratified several human rights conventions, including two International Covenants, argues that it continues efforts to ensure the enjoyment of human rights. More recently, a distinctive change has also been shown in the field of human rights, especially through the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). In this review, despite downsides to the human rights situation in the DPRK, the government actively involved itself in the discussions on the DPRK’s human rights issues. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the DPRK, Marzuki Darusman, welcomed the proactive approach to the UPR process by the government in his report to the General Assembly. However, this language also suggests that the government has started to make a diplomatic row over human rights. Therefore, there are not only positive but also negative aspects to its human rights performance. Furthermore, an important point to remember is that the situation of human rights in the DPRK is such that not all human rights are fully guaranteed as claimed by the government. Bearing in mind that the regime is committing serious human rights violations, this paper aims to identify the DPRK’s international human rights policies and to clarify problems encountered in the UN human rights mechanisms by focusing especially on the second UPR of the DPRK.

What mechanisms facilitate state compliance with human rights? This article proposes and applies a model to assess the extent to which two United Nations human rights mechanisms—the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and the state reporting procedure of the treaty bodies—are perceived as capable of stimulating compliance with human rights, and why. It does so by identifying a set of goals potentially achieved by these organizations—generating pressure, stimulating learning, providing an accurate overview of states’ performance, and delivering practically feasible recommendations—and testing the extent to which reaching these goals is seen to facilitate compliance with human rights. It concludes that the treaty bodies’ perceived strength lies in providing states with learning opportunities and an accurate overview of their internal situations. In contrast, the UPR is deemed particularly strong in generating peer and public pressure on states. From a theoretical point of view, this article shows that, under certain conditions, the three main theoretical schools on compliance—enforcement, management, and constructivist—offer credible explanations for states’ performance in implementing human rights recommendations, with the enforcement school faring relatively better than the other two. Data were collected by means of forty semi-structured interviews and an online survey.

Operating under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Council, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is an unprecedented peer-review process in which states make recommendations to each other with regards to the human rights situation under their jurisdiction. In light of allegations of politicisation in the UPR, I develop a framework to provide some conceptual and methodological clarity around the concept of “politicisation” and how to observe it with the purpose of evaluating these claims which can be decisive for their effectiveness and survival of human rights institutions – it was that very same criticism that tainted the work of the now defunct UN Commission on Human Right and ultimately brought it down at the beginning of this century. This thesis focuses on studying the behaviour of recommending states in the UPR during the first two cycles (2008-2016). Using quantitative text analysis, network analysis, and interviews, the thesis explores questions on promotion and contestation of human rights in international institutions, as well as to what extent recommending states’ behaviour constitute an instrumental or normative use of the UPR. In addition, this research advances and assess the relevance of an original measure of the human rights identity of states, and finds that it plays a significant role in the human rights promotion, contestation, and politicisation that takes place in the UPR interactive dialogue.

The 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.

The 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, 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.

Civil society organizations are key actors in the promotion and protection of human rights in Nigeria and have participated in all the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) circles of the Government of Nigeria. The UPR is a first of its kind innovation adopted in 2006 by the Human Rights Council to complement the works of treaty bodies and involves the review on a periodic basis, the human rights records of all Member States of the United Nations. As a peer review process comprising three distinct stages and involving three major sources of information, this article exclusively ex-rays the UPR civil society report on the implementation of Nigeria’s international human rights obligations. As one of the three sources of information relied upon by the Human Rights Council in the Universal Periodic Review of the human rights record of the Government of Nigeria, this article, while focusing on the civil society information submitted to the Human Rights Council pursuant to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 60/251 concludes that despite advances in the promotion and protection of human rights claimed in its national report to be made in the implementation of international human rights obligations, there are still, from civil society lens, plethora of issues and gaps in the implementation of Nigeria’s international human rights obligations.

The scale and complexity of the issues posed by the Anthropocene requires resolution through the involvement of science with alternative knowledge systems. Indigenous peoples provide a rich source of alternative knowledge systems. The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (HRC) offers a way of involving indigenous perspectives into global discourses about the Anthropocene. UPR subjects each UN member state to a periodically scheduled review of its human rights record, but does so by welcoming reports from non-state sources including indigenous peoples. Indigenous use of UPR is welcomed by the UN HRC and encouraged by the International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs. While the UPR is ostensibly a component of the UN human rights system, it has become an inclusive process accommodating human rights issues arising from a broad array of subjects, including environmental problems. This means that the UPR allows indigenous peoples to take local environmental problems to an international level.

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (HRC) was designed to be a more inclusive, fairer and universal process. The enjoyment of all human rights in all states is reviewed. The process relies on a co-operative model to catalyse human rights implementation rather than the traditional confrontational model. While states appear to take the UPR more seriously than they take other human rights treaty bodies, the process has been criticised as being overly politicised and less rigorous than a system reliant on independent experts. Regardless of these criticisms there is no doubt of the potential of the UPR to improve the realisation of human rights within member states. At the heart of this is the partnership model that is an integral feature of the UPR.

The UN undertakes numerous human rights activities. Various UN entities have been established solely to promote and protect human rights, such as the Human Rights Council and the human rights treaty bodies. Others, such as the Security Council, have mandates intrinsically connected to human rights. Furthermore, a variety of UN specialized agencies, programmes and funds work in areas associated with human rights. However, the work these entities undertake lacks coordination. In his 2020 Call to Action, UN Secretary-General António Guterres spoke of the need to enhance ‘synergies between human rights and all pillars of the work of the United Nations’ and encouraged the use of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process as a way of doing so. Furthermore, one of the ‘principles’ of UPR is that it should ‘complement and not duplicate other human rights mechanisms’. There has been little exploration of the extent to which UPR does, in fact, complement the UN’s other work in human rights. This article seeks to fill that gap. Drawing on data from the first three cycles of UPR, it demonstrates the extent to which states have complemented UN efforts to protect and promote human rights in UPR recommendations. Building on these empirical observations, it explores how UPR recommendations could be used to further coordinate and reinforce the UN’s human rights work by avoiding generic references to the UN, expanding their focus beyond the ‘core’ UN human rights bodies to engage with the work of all UN entities, and encouraging engagement with all aspects of a particular entity’s mandate.

This article examines the effectiveness of South Africa’s engagement with the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review Mechanism (UPR). After two cycles of the UPR, questions on the ability of the UPR mechanism to improve the human rights situation on the ground is gaining increasing attention. This article underscores the value of cooperation and dialogue in monitoring human rights implementation. It analyses the extent of South Africa’s engagement with the UPR mechanism and considers the potential impact of human rights ritualism in the UPR engagement of South Africa.