The UNHRC in State Participation

The United Nations’ Council for Human Rights was created to protect and promote the universal human rights agreed upon in the 1948 UN Declaration for Human Rights (UNHCR 2020; United Nations 1948). The last 20 years have seen quite a few challenges and changes for the regime, but one issue remains prevalent. We live in a world where each state has its own priorities and preferences, and with these come incentives for acting in some areas and disincentives for others. In the study of human rights, this idea of political bias is called politicization (Carraro 2017). 

What is the UNHRC?

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is a body of 47 states that are collectively responsible for managing the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and addressing human rights violations in specific countries or priority themes. It was established in 2006 after decades of backlash against the original Commission on Human Rights as the UN sought to resecure the creditability of the regime. The new body was designed to be a nonpolitical, cooperative force for improved quality of life for all. The member states are secretly elected by the UN General Assembly and are to evaluate each other’s performance in all their human rights obligations through the UPR. However, each state has quite a bit of independence regarding their reports and recommendations, and we’ve seen this leeway often get taken advantage of (OHCHR 2022).

What is the Issue?

The UNHRC has many issues with bias in its voting patterns that have lead to decisions being made based off political allegiance or allyship. 

How the Issue Forms

The effects of politization on the UNHRC are two-fold. First, it tends to cause the bias across countries, which is conceptualized as country bias (Cararro 2017). 

Because different member states have differing levels of power and influence, and often very different priorities, we see divides and trends regarding state relationships and UPR recommendations. 

Of the three main biases affecting the UNHRC, country bias is arguably the largest source of politicization. In a 2015 survey of Treaty Body committee members, 61.4% of respondents said that UPR recommendations formulated to reviewed countries are often politically motivated and 52.3% said that bias often occurs where some states are more negatively targeted than others with similar human rights performances (Cararro 2017). 

Second, it could lead to issue preference within groups of countries. Another concept called political affinity is used by some scholars to show just how much these biases affect recommendations. As political affinity, or state-to-state friendship, increases we see a higher proportion of ‘safe’ issues being addressed. ‘Safe’ issues tend to be relatively less sensitive or controversial and have less damaging effects to the country if publicized. Examples of safe issue violations include human rights training education or disabilities. On the other hand, with ‘sensitive’ issues regarding things like the death penalty or sexual orientation and gender identity, states are less likely to report their allies than their opponents (Terman and Byun 2021).