New York, 22 September 2024 – World leaders today adopted a Pact for the Future that includes a Global Digital Compact and a Declaration on Future Generations. This Pact is the culmination of an inclusive, years-long process to adapt international cooperation to the realities of today and the challenges of tomorrow. The most wide-ranging international agreement in many years, covering entirely new areas as well as issues on which agreement has not been possible in decades, the Pact aims above all to ensure that international institutions can deliver in the face of a world that has changed dramatically since they were created.
“The Pact for the Future, the Global Digital Compact, and the Declaration on Future Generations open the door to new opportunities and untapped possibilities,” said the Secretary-General during his remarks at the opening of the Summit of the Future.
The Pact covers a broad range of issues including peace and security, sustainable development, climate change, digital cooperation, human rights, gender, youth and future generations, and the transformation of global governance. Key deliverables in the Pact include:
In the area of peace and security
On sustainable development, climate and financing for development
The entire Pact is designed to turbo-charge implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The most detailed agreement ever at the United Nations on the need for reform of the international financial architecture so that it better represents and serves developing countries.
Improving how we measure human progress, going beyond GDP to capturing human and planetary wellbeing and sustainability.
A commitment to consider ways to introduce a global minimum level of taxation on high-net-worth individuals.
On climate change, confirmation of the need to keep global temperature rise to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
On digital cooperation
The Global Digital Compact, annexed to the Pact, is the first comprehensive global framework for digital cooperation and AI governance.
At the heart of the Compact is a commitment to design, use and govern technology for the benefit of all.
Youth and future generations
The first ever Declaration on Future Generations, with concrete steps to take account of future generations in our decision-making, including a possible envoy for future generations.
A commitment to more meaningful opportunities for young people to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, especially at the global level.
Human rights and gender
A strengthening of our work on human rights, gender equality and the empowerment of women.
A clear call on the need to protect human rights defenders.
Strong signals on the importance of engagement of other stakeholders in global governance, including local and regional governments, civil society, private sector and others.
There are provisions across the Pact and its annexes for follow-up action, to ensure that the commitments made are implemented.
The Summit brought together over 4000 individuals from Heads of State and Government, observers, IGOs, UN System, civil society and non-governmental organizations. In a broader push to increase the engagement of diverse actors, the formal Summit was preceded by the Action Days from 20-21 September, which attracted more than 7,000 individuals representing all segments of society. The Action Days featured strong commitments to action by all stakeholders, as well as pledges of USD 1.05 billion to advance digital inclusion.
Michelle Langrand for Geneva Solutions of 20 March 2024 has an exclusive report on the liquidity crunch and its effect on the UN human rights branch. Here her report in full:
UN secretary general António Guterres and UN human rights high commissioner Volker Türk at the opening of the Human Rights Council 55th session in Geneva, 26 February 2024. (UN Photo/Elma Okic)
As the United Nations faces its worst liquidity crisis in recent history, experts, staff and observers worry about the ramifications on human rights work. Correspondence seen by Geneva Solutions reveals concerns at the highest levels of the UN human rights branch in Geneva as they are forced to scale back their operations.
A patchwork of cost-saving measures taken over the winter holidays at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, from keeping the heat down and closing the premises for two weeks, revealed how serious the UN’s cash troubles were after states failed to fully pay their bills in 2023. The new year didn’t brighten prospects either. In January, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres in New York announced that “aggressive cash conservation measures” would be taken across the organisation to avoid running out of cash by August as year-end arrears reached a record $859 million.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time for a cash-strapped UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) as worsening human rights crises worldwide add to its workload. The Geneva-based office acts as a secretariat for dozens of independent experts, investigative bodies and human rights committees that rely for the most part on the UN’s regular budget and few voluntary contributions from states. Between vacancies and travel restrictions, both insiders and outsiders worry that planned cuts could severely impair the UN’s crucial human rights work.
Understaffed and overwhelmed
On 12 February, just as the UN’s Geneva headquarters prepared for one of its busiest months hosting the Human Rights Council’s first session of the year, bad news came from New York. Countries had only paid one-third of the UN’s $3.59bn regular budget for 2024, and instructions from the higher-ups were that the hiring freeze imposed in July 2023 would be extended throughout 2024 across UN operations. The organisation said that $350 million would need to be shaved off through spending restrictions on travel, conference services and others.
Human rights bodies, where vacancies had been piling up in the last months, would have to continue to run with reduced staff. In a letter from 23 December, UN high commissioner for human rights Volker Türk had already warned Council president Omar Zniber that 63 posts in over 10 investigative mandates were waiting to be filled while recruitments had been placed on hold. Currently, there are active investigations on serious human rights abuses in Ukraine, Iran, Syria, South Sudan and Nicaragua among others.
“While no compromise has been made in terms of methodology, some of the investigative bodies have had to narrow the scope of both their investigations and their upcoming reports,” the letter reads.
The fact-finding mission on Sudan was one of the bodies immediately affected. Created in October to collect evidence on atrocities committed during the last year of bloody conflict in which thousands of civilians have been killed and millions displaced, the probe body has struggled to begin work. The independent experts composing it, who aren’t paid, have been appointed since December, but as of late February, the Human Rights Office hadn’t been able to hire a support team due to insufficient cash flow, according to a Human Rights Council spokesperson. The experts, who have been mandated for one year, are due to present their findings in September, with observers wondering whether the western-led proposal will garner the political backing it needs to be renewed.
That isn’t the only initiative struggling to get off the ground. “We have met with some new mandates, and we realised that they barely have a team, if any, to support them,” said one NGO member who collaborates with the human rights mechanisms and asked to remain anonymous. Observers say most investigative bodies, even older ones, are impacted at some level.
Kaoru Okoizumi, deputy head of the Independent Investigative Mechanism on Myanmar (IIMM) – the largest human rights probe team – said six out of 57 staff positions funded through the UN’s regular budget were vacant, significantly affecting their work. The IIMM, which also relies on a trust fund made up of voluntary donations and doesn’t depend on the OHCHR’s budget, is coping better than most.
Expert committees that oversee states’ compliance with international human rights law, such as on children’s rights and on torture, are also stretched thin. One staffer said they were required to take on more work than normally expected, for example, having to conduct research and compile information about several countries at the same time for one session. “It’s just too much!” they said, adding that their team was short of more than 10 people.
Another worker from the OHCHR’s special procedures branch, who said was covering for several vacant spots, conceded that the quality of work is affected in such conditions. “Of course, you won’t work as well after pulling all-nighters,” they said. Türk’s letter to Zniber acknowledges that the secretariat was having trouble supporting some 60 special procedures, which are UN-backed independent experts or groups of experts assigned to report to the council on a specific theme or country.
While the problem of understaffing isn’t new, and many also point to cumbersome months-long recruitment processes that are often incompatible with brief mandates, the situation has worsened. To compensate for the hiring freeze, the UN has also increasingly resorted to temporary contracts that last for a few months and can be exceptionally renewed for up to two years. The two workers, who have living on contract to contract for more than a year, said that there is fear that temporary staff may be among the first to go, along with consultants. “In the food chain of contracts, we’re at the bottom,” one of them said.
A slim year for the Human Rights Council
The UN’s human rights branch, which receives as little as four per cent of the UN’s total budget – around $142 million – just enough to cover one third of its activities, has been scrambling to cut back on spending. On Friday, in another letter seen by Geneva Solutions, Türk informed Zniber that his office would be forced to axe certain activities this year.
OHCHR spokesperson Marta Hurtado confirmed the information to Geneva Solutions by writing: “The office has developed an internal contingency plan, which provides for adjustment pending the complete availability of regular budget resources become available.”
Among the measures it proposes is postponing some activities to 2025 altogether while as many consultations and meetings as possible would be moved online without interpretation, according to Hurtado, since the UN in New York hasn’t authorised it for virtual meetings. For those that will be held in person, resources to fly in experts and civil society will also be reduced.
The UN’s recent decision that it would no longer provide online services for meetings has drawn outcry from rights campaigners who argue it curtails the possibility of civil society groups and states with little resources to participate. While the move has been attributed to matters of rules, observers can’t help but wonder if it isn’t, in the end, about the money. Echoing the concerns in the letter, Türks described the impact of these measures on participation from experts and other stakeholders as “deeply regrettable”.
Another issue raised by the UN rights chief is the difficulty that his office has been facing in providing technical assistance to national authorities. He gave the example of the Marshall Islands, which requested help in 2022 to assess the human rights impact of US nuclear testing in its territory in the 1940s and 50s. A source said that although a first visit finally took place this year, work has been delayed.
Marc Limon, director of the human rights think tank Universal Rights Group, remarked that work by the Council to help states improve their rights record through capacity-building support was unfortunately “almost inexistent” and regretted that resources couldn’t be spared for what he calls the “hard end of human rights diplomacy”. “While UN investigations must be protected, there is little threat to key commissions of inquiry due to the huge budgets allocated to them in the first place,” he said. Most probe bodies have between 17 to 27 staff while special procedures usually have one or two assistants.
The Moroccan ambassador forwarded Türk’s letter to fellow states on Monday and said a draft decision regarding the measures would be tabled for the council to consider at the end of the session at the beginning of April.
Human rights credibility at stake
One that has raised eyebrows but isn’t explicitly mentioned by the UN rights chief is limiting country visits by UN experts to one visit instead of two. Hurtado acknowledged that special procedures and other expert mechanisms, including probe bodies, would see their country visits “reduced” while not commenting on the number of authorised visits.
One UN expert, speaking under the condition of anonymity, voiced concern over the restriction. “Country visits are extremely important because they give us a real intimate understanding of a place and the state gets direct feedback on what they’re doing well and what they can do to improve, while also energising civil society,” they said, point out that experts were already barely able to conduct visits during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Limon commented that while it was a wise choice to cut back on some of the “superfluous” debates and activities, reducing special rapporteur trips to countries to one per year, an idea that he said has been floated around before, showed the office “had its priorities wrong”.
Travel restrictions could also have significant implications for criminal cases. Okoizumi said her Myanmar team only had 65 per cent of its usual travel budget, which is key for the Geneva-based group to reach victims and witnesses. “We do our witness interviews in person because we think it’s important in a criminal investigation to make sure that interviews are being conducted in a way that preserves the integrity of the testimony,” she said.
The body, set up in 2018 by the Human Rights Council, is currently working to support a case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar for violating the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice, as well as investigations on crimes against the Rohingya at the International Criminal Court and Argentina.
“These are very concrete proceedings and our ability to support them will be impacted by the number of interviews that we’re able to conduct or the analysis that we’re able to produce and share with these jurisdictions,” Okoizumi said, noting that the ICJ case is particularly time-sensitive as both parties were expected to make submissions this year.
The international lawyer said this has meant shifting resources to meet shorter-term deadlines at the risk of putting aside other objectives. “The whole point of having an investigative mechanism is to make sure that we can collect the evidence very soon after a crime happens, even if there isn’t an investigation or prosecution until many years or even decades later. So, shifting our resources in that way, overall will have a negative impact,” she explained.
Top experts within the human rights branch have also rang alarm bells about the wider repercussions of the funding crisis. In a letter seen by Geneva Solutions addressed to the president of the General Assembly, Dennis Francis, dated 23 February, 10 chairs of human rights committees warned that the liquidity crisis “severely threatens the credibility and efficiency of the United Nations human rights system”.
The experts said the treaty bodies were “being denied even the minimum staff and operational resources required to deliver their critical mandates to advance human rights” at a time of “such a severe existential crisis of multilateralism and of non compliance with international law”.
Referring to some of the measures being considered, the signatories also argue that suspending sessions “for the first time in their over six decades of history for financial reasons, together with visits to prevent torture and other human rights violations” would lead to “concrete and irreversible” harm.
“When the collective security system has failed to honour the ‘never again’ pledge of 1945, the least to do is to strengthen human rights monitoring mechanisms, so that human rights violations are documented, even when justice seems extremely challenging to serve. We note with deep regret that the opposite is being done,” the custodians of human rights law wrote.
On 12 March 2024 the recently appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, Ben Saul, warned that two decades of prolific global efforts to counter terrorism have not been matched by an equally robust commitment to human rights.
In his first report to the Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur painted a counter-terrorism landscape strewn with human rights violations, including unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, torture, unfair trials, privacy infringements from mass surveillance, and the criminalisation of freedoms of expression, assembly, association and political participation. For earlier posts on this topic, see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/anti-terrorism-legislation/
“The misuse of counter-terrorism measures not only violates the rights of suspected criminals but can also jeopardise the freedoms of the innocent,” Saul said.
He condemned the rampant weaponisation of overly-broad terrorism offences against civil society, including political opponents, activists, human rights defenders, journalists, minorities, and students. Unjustified and protracted states of emergency continue to undermine human rights, the expert warned.
“Excessive military violence in response to terrorism also destroys fundamental rights, including through violations of international humanitarian law and international criminal law,” Saul said. “Cross-border military violence is increasingly used by states even when it is not justified under the international law of self-defence.”
“Many states have also failed to address the root causes of terrorism, including state violations of human rights – while impunity for those violations is endemic,” he said.
Saul said regrettably, the UN has been part of the problem, by encouraging authoritarian regimes to strengthen counter-terrorism laws in the absence of a rule of law culture or human rights safeguards. “The UN must also do better to meaningfully consult civil society on counter-terrorism,” he said.
Announcing his priorities for his three-year term, the Special Rapporteur said his focus would include ensuring regional organisations respect human rights when countering terrorism; all coercive administrative measures used to prevent terrorism comply with human rights; and States are held accountable for large-scale violations of human rights resulting from counter terrorism – and victims receive full and effective remedies.
Saul will also continue the efforts of his predecessor on preventing the abuse of counter-terrorism measures against civil society; protecting the 70,000 people arbitrarily detained in north-east Syria in the conflict against ISIL; protecting detainees and transferees from the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; ensuring that the UN safeguards human rights in its counter-terrorism work, regulating new technologies used in counter-terrorism; and protecting the victims of terrorism.
“Human rights in counter-terrorism are at increased risk because of rising authoritarianism, surging domestic polarisation and extremism, geopolitical competition, dysfunction in the Security Council and new tools, including social media, for fuelling dehumanisation, vilification, incitement and misinformation,” the Special Rapporteur warned.
“Double standards and selectivity by major powers in the enforcement of human rights is also eroding public confidence in the credibility of the international human rights system,” he said. “States must move beyond rhetorical commitment to human rights and instead place human rights at the heart of all counter-terrorism measures.”
On 15 February 2024 AP carried the story that Venezuela’s government has ordered the local UN office on human rights to suspend operations, giving its staff 72 hours to leave, after accusing the office of promoting opposition to the South American country. The UN office was established in Caracas in September 2019.
The foreign affairs minister, Yván Gil, announced the decision at a news conference in Caracas on Thursday. Gil’s announcement came on the heels of the detention of the human rights attorney Rocío San Miguel, which set off a wave of criticism inside and outside Venezuela.
The South American country’s government said it had made a decision “to suspend the activities of the technical advisory office of the UN high commissioner for human rights and carry out a holistic revision of the technical cooperation terms”.
The government said the UN human rights office must rectify its “colonialist, abusive and violating attitude”, accusing it of playing an “inappropriate role” in the country and supporting impunity for people involved in attempts at assassination, coups, conspiracies and other plots.
The Venezuelan government regularly accuses members of the political opposition of plotting takeovers or the assassination of President Nicolas Maduro, all accusations vehemently denied by opposing parties and their members.
“We regret this announcement and are evaluating the next steps. We continue to engage with the authorities and other stakeholders,” said UN human rights office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani. “Our guiding principle has been and remains the promotion and protection of the human rights of the people of Venezuela.”
Venezuelan state television on Wednesday harshly criticized comments by the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, who just concluded a visit to Venezuela. Fakhri had said in a statement the government food program does not tackle the root causes of hunger and is susceptible to political influences.
San Miguel was taken into custody on Friday at the airport near Caracas while she and her daughter awaited a flight to Miami. Authorities did not acknowledge her detention until Sunday, and as of Wednesday her attorney had not been allowed to meet with her.
San Miguel’s daughter, ex-husband, two brothers and former partner were also detained following her arrest. Of them, only her former partner remains in custody.
UN experts today emphasised the need for the international community to support civil society groups expressing international solidarity in pursuit of peace and social justice and not to conflate international solidarity with antisemitism or islamophobia. It is a remarkably large group of UN experts (see below). They have issued the following statement:
We would like to raise public awareness about the need to support concrete actions by civil society groups that express international solidarity in our pursuit of peace and social justice.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1 establishes universal solidarity as the foundation for human rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood [and sisterhood].”
Around the world, civil society groups have expressed international solidarity in marches and social media campaigns to call for peace and the protection of civilians in armed conflict. Moreover, they have also expressed international solidarity in pursuit of non-discrimination and equality (the core elements of positive peace) by advocating access to justice, truth, protection, and humane treatment for: children, women, members of the LGBTAIQ+ community, persons affected by leprosy (Hansen’s disease), persons with disabilities, racialized, indigenous groups, and other minorities subjected to violence, hate speech, and discrimination, families of disappeared persons, refugees and migrants, victims of terrorism/violent extremism and counter-terrorism/violent extremism measures, and the environment.
The recent significant engagement of people of all ages and diverse backgrounds in the expression of international solidarity is a powerful affirmation of the value of human rights as a narrative of emancipation in response to violence, oppression, and marginalisation.
It is imperative that civil society actors not be subject to censorship and reprisals for their expression of international solidarity, including loss of funding, loss of employment, arrest, attack, harassment, persecution, criminalisation, or other forms of penalisation.
Actions and expressions that promote transnational unity, empathy, tolerance, and cooperation are the elements of a strong culture of international solidarity in support of peace and social progress.
The most striking impact of the contemporary expressions of international solidarity is their embrace of the principle of humanity – the demand to protect life and alleviate human suffering. The combination of these two universal principles underscores the priority of exhausting peaceful dispute resolution mechanisms before using force.
We call on the international community to encourage International Solidarity expressions of civil society groups and human rights defenders that acknowledge that everyone should enjoy human rights without discrimination of any type. States should open civic spaces and refrain from criminalising non-violent actions and expressions that promote international solidarity. International Solidarity should not be conflated with antisemitism, islamophobia, or other movements that are examples of exclusionary, segregated unitary orientations which violate non-discrimination and equality principles.
International Solidarity promotes inclusion through bridge-building and invites everyone to stand up for peace as a fundamental premise for the enjoyment of human rights.”
The occasion of UDHR@75 has let to many articles on its relevance to today’s world, which sees such a ‘heightened risk’ of mass atrocities due to global inaction and a diminished UN ‘responsibility to protect’ principle and ambition to prevent genocides, as stated by Julian Borger in the Guardian of 8 December 2023. These warnings come on the 75th anniversaries this weekend of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both signed in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the hope that the world would act in concert to prevent a repeat of such mass slaughter.
Borger describes also in some detail how the USA’s ambition to stop atrocity crimes had “diminished in terms of its saliency within the administration as a guiding principle”
Two pieces in Geneva Solutions look at the UDHR closer:
One is by Pip Cook: “Universal Declaration of Human Rights: fit for the 21st century?” and the other by Marc Limon “After 75 years, what is the UN human rights system’s theory of change?”
The first starts with a good overview of the birth of the UDHR and then states: …”With the world facing human rights challenges on so many fronts, some might be tempted to dismiss the declaration as idealistic or unrealistic – a non-legally binding document that nations may claim to adhere to on the international stage but disregard entirely depending on their own political agendas. However, defenders of the UDHR argue that to judge it on how often it is violated is to miss its point altogether.
“I’m not sure how much the document can be judged on whether it’s always adhered to or not,” said Felix Kirchmeier, executive director of the Geneva Human Rights Platform. “That question comes up in human rights all the time, but it comes up much less in other domains. Nobody would ask whether health policy was still valuable now that we have the pandemic.”
“I think the declaration might be even more needed now than ever because it allows us to really see these core values and the universal approach to them,” he added. “The proof of its relevance is the fact that despite all violations of human rights and despite all the attacks to the universal validity of human rights, the document itself is not being disputed in any serious way,” he continued. “So I think that’s also proof of its strength.”
….Ultimately, perhaps the greatest value of the declaration is that it gave universal human rights a language. Known as the most translated document in the world, available in 500 different languages, it provides a rhetoric that people from all corners of the world still use to this day..
Pip closes with the words of Eleanor Roosevelt in her speech to the UN to mark the tenth anniversary of the declaration in 1958. Her words captured the reason why human rights are for every one of us, in all parts of our daily lives, as well as the world as a whole. “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” she began. “In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works.
The second piece by Limon – executive director of the Universal Rights Group - asks: …”Yet two equally – if not more – crucial questions linger: what was the Universal Declaration’s theory of change, meaning how did its authors intend for it to improve the situation of human rights for all “the Peoples” of the UN, and has the UN succeeded in translating the universal norms into local reality?”
Different actors have developed markedly different theories of what the UN human rights system is, what it is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to improve the situation of human rights at the national level.
For some, the system is mainly for the benefit of developing countries, and its principal utility is to respond to serious human rights violations and hold abusing states accountable. Its main purpose, in other words, is to protect human rights.
For others, it is a universal system in which all states should be treated equally. It is there to engage with them through cooperation and dialogue to gradually improve human rights laws, policies and practices over time, including through the delivery of international capacity-building support. The system’s main objective here is, in other words, to promote human rights.
For some, human rights norms should be in a constant state of progressive development, even in sensitive issues such as sexual orientation and gender identity, or sexual and reproductive health and rights, and should be imposed by the UN. Where states resist, it is because they are not committed to human rights and should be called out and forced to catch up.
For others, the UN is there to provide a platform where states can reach a common understanding of universal human rights norms. This is what happened in the case of the UN’s recognition of the right to a healthy environment. After that, it can provide capacity-building and technical support to help those countries making insufficient progress…
So, who is right? There is some truth to both views. For example, the mandate of the Human Rights Council explicitly includes both the protection and promotion dimensions of human rights. And therein lies the answer – the international human rights system, built from the foundations of the Universal Declaration, embodies different – yet complementary – theories of change.
The simple truth is that human rights change cannot be imposed from the outside, by certain states or even by the international community as a whole, without the consent of the state concerned. Bottom-up demands for change, for example, led by local civil society, can and frequently do succeed in securing improvements in the enjoyment of human rights, especially in democracies.
However, in many countries, the power imbalance between civil society and governments means that NGOs and local communities, acting alone, can be easily ignored or even suppressed.
Over a decade of the Universal Rights Group’s research shows that a winning approach, instead, is to combine top-down pressure for improvement with bottom-up calls for change within a framework that is accepted by the state or government and of which it feels a sense of ownership…
While the international human rights system, therefore, encapsulates different and complementary theories of change (think “carrot and stick”), for a vast majority of states, the vast majority of the time, the former theory of change is the most relevant.
As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there are increasing signs, from states (both developed and developing), civil society, the secretary general, the high commissioner, UN resident coordinators and others, of a shift towards a common understanding of this predominant theory of change. Building on that shared understanding and thereby effectively translating universal rights into local reality would truly be the best way to mark the adoption of this historic document.
AP reported on 2 December 2023 that protesters at the United Nations’ COP28 climate summit demonstrated Saturday for imprisoned human rights activists in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, the past and current host of the negotiations.
However, just before the demonstration organized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, protesters had to fold over signs bearing the Emirati detainees’ names — even after they already had crossed out messages about them. The order came roughly 10 minutes before the protest was due to start from the U.N., which said it could not guarantee the security of the demonstration, said Joey Shea, a researcher at Human Rights Watch focused on the Emirates.
“It is a shocking level of censorship in a space that had been guaranteed to have basic freedoms protected like freedom of expression, assembly and association,” Shea of HRW told The Associated Press.
On Monday 18 September, over 50 activists, members of civil society organisations and diplomatic partners gathered on Geneva’s Place des Nations, unfurling a giant banner celebrating the right to defend human rights, as enshrined in the foundational UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders.
The banner and gathering were meant to mark the 25th anniversary of the Declaration, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1998. The document explicitly laid out the rights of human rights defenders and the protection owed to them by governments and businesses, emphasising that everyone has the right to advocate and defend rights and fundamental freedoms.
On 28 September 2023, the UN Secretary-General’s report on reprisals was presented, which covers the period from 1 May 2022 to 30 April 2023. Over 220 individuals and 25 organizations in 40 countries across the world faced threats and retaliation from State and non-State actors for cooperating with the UN on human rights.
Human rights defenders and other civil society actors are increasingly under surveillance and continued to face legal proceedings, travel bans and threats, and be given prison sentences for cooperating with the UN and the UN’s human mechanisms.
Among the growing trends noted in the report is the increase in people either choosing not to cooperate with the UN due to concerns for their safety, or only doing so if kept anonymous.
Victims and witnesses in two-thirds of the States listed in the report requested anonymous reporting of reprisals, compared with one-third in last year’s report. And most people who reported facing reprisals for their cooperation with the Security Council and its peace operations, as well as with the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues did so on the condition of anonymity.
A second trend was the increasing surveillance of those who cooperate or attempt to cooperate with the UN, being reported in half of the countries named in the report. An increase in physical surveillance by State actors was also noted, likely linked to the return to in-person forms of engagement with the UN.
Third, almost forty-five per cent of the in the report continued to apply or enact new laws and regulations concerning civil society, counter-terrorism and national security, which punish, deter or hinder cooperation with the UN and its human rights mechanisms. These legislative frameworks represent severe obstacles to long-standing human rights partners of the UN worldwide, and were used to outlaw some of them, raid their offices, and question, threaten or try their staff.
Finally, the specificity and severity of acts of reprisals against women and girls, which constitute half of the victims in this year’s report, was once again identified with concern.
Most of them are human rights defenders and civil society representatives targeted for their cooperation with UN human rights mechanisms and peace operations, but there is also a significant number of judicial officers and lawyers subjected to reprisals for their cooperation with the UN in search of accountability and remedy.
“We have a duty to those who put their trust in us,” said Brands Kehris. “That is why at the UN, we are determined to live up to our collective responsibility to prevent and address intimidation and reprisals against those who cooperate with the organization and its human rights mechanisms.”
The 40 States referred to in the report are: Algeria, Afghanistan, Andorra, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Colombia, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, France, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Maldives, Mali, Mexico, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, the Russian Federation, South Sudan, United Republic of Tanzania, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of), Yemen, and the State of Palestine.
On 6 July 2023 Janika Spannagel in Open Global Rights comes with a study of great importance to the work for human rights defenders. The researcher states that “focusing only on defenders’ physical integrity risks undermining the very idea of supporting agents of human rights change” and that there is a need to Rethink campaigns on human rights defenders
Instead of summarising I will provide large quotes:
,,,,The theory of change put forward by actors, including Front Line Defenders, International Service for Human Rights, and many others, claims that by protecting local human rights activists, international campaigns can support them in their work to advance human rights protection on the ground. This assumption appears plausible and aligns with prominent accounts in academic human rights literature, where domestic activists’ protection from repression is seen as a way to open spaces for them to challenge the regime and enact change.
That said, empirical evidence from UN casework and the experience of Tunisian defenders shows that this promise has not been fulfilled when it comes to human rights defenders in authoritarian regimes, as I show in my recent book. There, I argue that, while international attention can have important protective benefits, it does little to support individual human rights defenders as agents of change in repressive contexts. [Emphasis added]
The reason for this is that international casework on defenders, including urgent action–like campaigns or UN communications, maintain the traditional focus on physical integrity rights that has guided the long-standing casework on political imprisonment, torture, or enforced disappearances. In doing so, it overlooks the many administrative, discursive, and covert forms of repression that typically bypass international scrutiny more broadly but that often very effectively disrupt and thwart defenders’ work toward change.
The analysis of over 12,000 individual cases of human rights activists taken up by the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders between 2000 and 2016 reveals that, in almost three-quarters of them, at least one of the violations described fell within the category of physical integrity violations. Detention cases alone made up 56% of all cases raised during that period. In contrast, only 4% of the cases dealt exclusively with softer types of repression, such as travel bans, bureaucratic issues, job dismissals, surveillance, or defamation.
This distribution far from represents the everyday experience of human rights defenders in authoritarian states—instead, it is reflective of a humanitarian instinct in human rights casework to privilege cases that are considered most severe. One could argue that UN communications, and perhaps attention-based campaigning more broadly, are inherently humanitarian, not transformative instruments. But one should ask: What, then, is the purpose of focusing on human rights defenders, as opposed to any victim of repression? [Emphasis added]
The priority given to physical integrity violations has two important adverse consequences. First, we can see that the data profoundly shape our understanding of what human rights defenders are struggling with. For example, on the basis of such data a CIVICUS report claims that in order to repress civic space, states resort “most often” to detention of activists, attacks against journalists, and excessive use of force against protesters. The human rights community’s own focus on violent repression thus paradoxically misleads us to believe that this is where most attention is needed.
Secondly, this focus reinforces a protection gap for violations that fall outside of the conventional notion of state repression as physically harmful and as undeniably politically motivated. Research on repression highlights that authoritarian states engage in repressive substitution, where they replace highly scrutinized coercive tactics—typically harder and overt types of repression—with softer and more covert measures. The case of Tunisia under Ben Ali aptly illustrates the strong impact of such tactics on defenders’ ability to carry out meaningful work.
When analyzing the further development of cases taken up by the UN, I also found that, while some positive effects of the UN’s attention could be identified for most of them, many did not see an actual improvement relative to the reported violations over the course of the next year; where they did, it was mostly an easing of harder repression. Ultimately, there is a real risk that governments continue to use hard repression to increase their bargaining power and then pass off a release from prison as a costly concession, while in reality imposing softer but equally effective measures against the activist in question.
With this problem in mind, what could be done differently? Casework that follows a transformative logic should not seek to maximize the reduction of physical harm—the humanitarian logic—but should define protection needs in terms of safeguarding a defender’s ability to do effective human rights work.
Those engaging in casework and campaigns on human rights defenders should actively revisit their priorities in terms of the violations they tend to address. Far too often, softer repression remains unreported, unnoticed, and not acted upon, which effectively creates a twilight zone in which authoritarian states can comfortably stifle opposition voices without risking much pushback. We owe it to the countless number of human rights activists around the world to ensure that the label of “human rights defender” does not merely serve to laud their heroism and excite donors and the media, but that it is dedicated to fulfilling its promise of human rights change.
On 14 February, 2023 Louis Charbonneau, HRW United Nations Director, reported that the UN General Assembly achieved a funding breakthrough by agreeing to fully fund UN human rights mechanisms that China, Russia, and their allies had sought to defund in the 2023 budget. All these efforts failed. The Czech Republic as European Union president countered by proposing full funding for human rights mechanisms at the level proposed by Secretary-General António Guterres. The resolution passed by a sizable majority.
There’s more good news. Not only did the defunding efforts fail, but the highly problematic recommendations put forward by the UN Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions were rejected. The Advisory Committee is supposed to be an independent body of experts, but in recent years, its “experts” from countries like China and Russia have been pushing their governments’ anti-human rights agendas and advocating for sharp cuts in funding for human rights work, with no good reasons. Due to divisions between western countries and developing states, the standard UN funding compromise had become accepting the non-binding Advisory Committee recommendations. For example, if its recommendations had been adopted, the staff and budget for the Iran commission of inquiry would have been cut in half.
This should set a precedent for UN human rights funding in the future.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 