Sleep-walking and breaking taboos

Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older but this feels like a particularly tiring Council session. And judging by the number of weary diplomatic faces around this week, I’m not the only one whose been feeling the strain. The Council is set to adopt more resolutions than at any other previous session, and with a record number of early morning starts, full-day sessions and panel discussions, the Council is becoming a place for those who perform best without much sleep.

Last week’s highlight was the panel discussion on discrimination and violence committed against people due to this sexual or gender identity, following South Africa’s brave resolution on the topic last June. This is the most sensitive issue at the Human Rights Council, with many countries refusing to recognise that this should be discussed at all. It divides delegates and delegations who otherwise work well together across a range of difficult subjects. The holding of the panel discussion marked a breakthrough, and there was a palpable sense in the Council that the United Nations had finally broken a major taboo. The UN Secretary General set the tone in a video message calling violence against LGBT people “a stain on our collective conscience” and a violation of international law before a range of states supported his call to respect non-discrimination and the universality of human rights. With the exception of Thailand, South Korea and South Africa, the positive statements came only from western and Latin American countries, and broad acceptance that this issue deserves attention is some way off. It was unfortunate that the members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference decided not to participate and headed for the exits when the panel began in a pre-arranged walkout.

UN audiences are tough crowds to please and delegates at this session have gone to great lengths to make their panel discussions more entertaining with outside moderators and more interactive formats. This has prompted a bit of a backlash from panel purists, with debate now raging about how panels should be organised in future. It’s hard to understand what the fuss is about and personally I’m all up for trying out experimental approaches to UN discussions. Perhaps every once in a while we could all convey our national positions through mime, traditional dance or telepathy.

The topic for this year’s rights of the child panel was the administration of justice. To remind us that we are talking about real people and not just concepts, it included Antonio Caparros Linares a young Spanish man who spoke engagingly about his personal experience in the juvenile justice system and how the right kind of support made all the difference. He and other panellists stressed the need to find alternatives to imprisonment for children, which is hugely expensive and doesn’t work. States have had much more success in preventing reoffending and keeping young people in society and out of prison through restorative forms of justice where perpetrators of offences meet their victims and make amends for the crime. I hope the Council will be able to share the panel’s key messages widely.

I always try to make time to attend NGO side events, but with the extra workload this session I’ve found it harder than usual, and judging by the low attendances, I’m not the only one. I think most delegates regard attending side events as something which they know is good for them but which they somehow don’t quite manage, a bit like doing yoga, drinking 8 glasses of water a day or eating tofu. But some of these events really are worth the time and this week I attended an excellent discussion about ongoing impunity in Nepal. With all the Council’s recent focus on countries like Syria, Libya and Iran it has been easy for others which were once in the spotlight to slip quietly off the Council’s radar. Alarmingly, Nepal has just asked the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to close its country office, despite its weak domestic human rights capacity. The overriding problem is impunity, with not a single person held accountable for the violations which occurred during the recent conflict. The Council really needs to find a way to help Nepal and others in similar situations to address the need for justice and accountability.

Next week promises to be a busy one with discussions on Syria, Burma, Iran and North Korea and delegations will be scrambling to finalise their resolutions before the deadline for tabling at the end of the week. I hope you’ve managed to get some rest this weekend. You’re going to need it.