The 5 year review and a spot of eavesdropping

I hope you’re all keeping warm. Like some other places in Europe, winter arrived particularly early in Geneva this year and caught the usually well prepared Swiss road and rail and services off guard last week. I miss the lengthy conversations about the weather which I used to hear wherever I went back home in Manchester so I’ve been getting  a warm nostalgic glow hearing so many colleagues talking about the snow and its consequences.  The question which people seemed to be asking each other wherever I went was whether they had put on their winter tyres in time.  The Swiss take their winters and their tyres very seriously, but like many foreigners I usually spend a good 9 months of the year foolishly driving round with the wrong season’s tyres, to the ridicule of my local neighbours. Happily, this worked in my favour this year as I still had last  year’s winter tyres on when the snow came down. I’ve been feeling just a tad smug about it, driving past abandoned cars as Geneva and its environs took on the look of an arctic wasteland.

The snow even managed to bring about the cancellation of one of the many meetings to discuss the ongoing review of the Human Rights Council which is now the dominant issue amongst the Geneva human rights crowd. For anyone unfamiliar with the process of Council review, imagine having a tooth slowly extracted over the course of 18 months. You’ll know it needed doing and probably feel a bit better at the end, but you’ll never quite understand why it took so long for so little reward.  The task of reviewing the Council after its 5th birthday was given to us by the Council’s founding mothers and fathers  at the UN General Assembly when they agreed to establish the Council in 2006, so it’s something we’ve got to do, like it or not. Personally, I find the whole process about as exciting as a cup of stewed tea that’s been sat out in the rain. But there’s a real danger that the UN main human rights mechanisms will be significantly weakened if the process is not given enough attention by those who want to see it work well, so I and the rest of my colleagues will keep toiling away on the Council Review for many weeks to come.

To give a crude summary of what has happened so far: the process more or less kicked off at the start of the year as certain states competed with each other for attention, like siblings born too close together, in order to stake a claim for a role for themselves in the process.  Many breakfast meetings, gatherings in foreign capitals and corridor discussions later, positions on the key issues began to emerge. The Council then held a  week-long meeting in late October at which states and NGOs submitted their formal proposals to the Thai Ambassador, as Council President, which have now been put together into a door-stop sized compilation.

So far, most of the ideas that might actually make a real difference to human rights on the ground have been rejected by an alliance of Egypt, as spokesperson for the Non-Aligned Movement, Pakistan, on behalf of the Organisation for the Islamic Conference, and Nigeria for the African Group, though the extent to which these represent group positions rather than the national priorities of the spokesperson is open to question.  The main basis for not improving the Council, which will be familiar to anyone who has sat through the review meetings, is the rather semantic mantra that Council “Review” does not equate to Council “Reform” and so any significant change should be off the table, including any proposals which might improve the Council’s ability to address human rights.

The President has entrusted 6 Geneva Ambassadors with trying to forge a compromise on the major issues. This isn’t going to be easy, but some of the Ambassadors are leading discussions with real skill. My personal favourite is the Indian Ambassador who has been chairing meetings on the Council’s programme of work with humour, intelligence and a large measure of class. The Council Review road-show has moved to Thailand this week, at the President’s invitation, in an attempt to move discussions forward.

I have stayed in Geneva’s less sunny shores to work on the drafting of a new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which will give children and their representatives the chance to bring complaints directly to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva.  During the opening statement by High Commissioner Pillay, I couldn’t help being distracted by the interpreter in the English translation booth who had accidentally left her microphone on for all to hear her private conversation with her colleague about selling her car.  It felt like a disappointing sequel to the film The Interpreter, where you’d need to imagine Nicole Kidman reading a copy of AutoTrader Magazine instead of overhearing plans for an assassination attempt.

Elsewhere in the world, I was happy to see that a few UN experts were invited to be members of the Foreign Secretary’s new Advisory Group on Human Rights which met for the first time this week. The Panel is an impressive collection of human rights experts who will help the Foreign Secretary in his human rights policy making. I hope that having a member of the UN Human Rights Committee and the Sub-Committee on Prevention of Torture will draw attention to the good work done by some of the UN Human Rights bodies in Geneva, as well as their potential to do more.

I hope I’ll find someone to do a guest blog to mark Human Rights Day on 10 December and I’ll be back with some seasonal thoughts before the Christmas winter break. In the meantime, please feel free to take advantage of the new blog format to send me your comments.