UPR process helps build genuine consultation
Productive engagement between government, national human rights institutions and civil society is one of the key benefits to emerge from the new UN process to review the human rights situation of individual countries.
Productive engagement between government, national human rights institutions (NHRIs) and civil society is one of the key benefits to emerge from the new UN process to review the human rights situation of individual countries, said participants at the APF's 13th Annual Meeting.
The Universal Period Review, established by the Human Rights Council, assesses the human rights situation of the 192 UN member states every four years.
The review is based on reports submitted by national governments, the country’s NHRI, non-government organisations (NGOs) and a report compiled by the OHCHR. Each report is required to describe how it was prepared, including whether or not it consulted with other parties.
The process of developing UPR reports, and the importance of putting in place mechanisms to promote genuine consultation between stakeholders, was the topic of a one-day workshop at APF 13. More than 120 representatives from NHRIs and NGOs attended the session.
Some countries which had no previous culture of working with civil society had been required to develop new approaches and had found the process meaningful, said Cynthia Gervais, Director of the Geneva Office of Rights and Democracy, who facilitated the discussion.
Gerard Winter, a former High Court judge in Fiji, helped Tonga to prepare its report for the UPR, which was reviewed by the Human Rights Council in May this year. More than 40 organisations were involved in the national consultations, which helped draw attention to a number of human rights issues.
“When we started the UPR process, the government's position was that there was no domestic violence in Tonga,” he said. “By providing statistics from the hospital's accident and emergency unit showing domestic violence, the government acknowledged the problem. Since then, Australia has assisted Tonga to come up with benchmarks.”
Henri Tiphagne, Executive Director of People's Watch in India, said the national consultation process there had engaged 192 groups. “This is a large number but, in my estimation, it is not a lot for a populous and diverse country like India,” he said, adding that the process had allowed civil society to mature.
In South Korea, however, the National Human Rights Commission assessed the consultation process between the government, NGOs and itself as not being sufficient either in its frequency or level of interaction.
“As a result, we were not able to capitalise on this opportunity to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the human rights situation and assess various prospects,” said Choi Soo-hee, the special assistant to the Chairman of National Human Rights Commission of the Republic of Korea (NHRCK).
Mr Homayoun Alizadeh, the regional representative of the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights in South-East Asia, said NHRIs should be directly involved in follow-up activities, such as communicating the outcomes of the UPR to the country’s key stakeholders and developing an action plan to implement recommendations.
To date a total of 32 countries have been reviewed during the first two sessions of the UPR, held earlier this year. The Human Rights Council will hold its third UPR session from 7 – 15 December 2008.
In the coming year the APF will provide practical support to NHRIs in the Asia Pacific region to engage effectively with the UPR process. It will produce a ‘best practice’ handbook, which will draw on the experiences of the NHRIs of India, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Republic of Korea, who have already participated in the first and second sessions of the UPR.
The APF also welcomed a proposal from the NHRCK to develop guidelines for monitoring the implementation of UPR recommendations.
