Universal Periodic Review
NOW is the time to challenge and lay pressure on reporting countries and the Working Group to ensure that education rights are dealt with!
Deadlines for submission of information concerning the Ninth Sessions of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review.
Submissions in relation to the 16 countries scheduled to be reviewed at this session (December 2010) should be sent to uprsubmissions@ohchr.org by:
* 12 April 2010 for submissions on Liberia, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Malawi, Mauritania, Lebanon, Maldives, Marshal Islands, Micronesia; and
* 19 April 2010 for submissions on Mongolia, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, United States of America, Andorra, Bulgaria, Croatia.
The page limit for submissions is 5 pages when submitted by individual stakeholders, and 10 pages when submitted by large coalitions of stakeholders.
For the 7th session (April 2010), the following countries will be examined, so NOW is the time to influence or 'shadow' the official reports: Angola, Egypt, Madagascar, Gambia, Qatar, Fiji, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Iraq, Kazakhstan, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Italy, San Marino, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
What is the Universal Periodic Review?
The Human Rights Council (HRC) was established in 2006 to replace the ineffective and over politicized Human Rights Committee. It consists of forty-seven Member States of the United Nations, and does stand the risk of becoming much like its predecessor.
However, the council is also responsible for the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), the latest reporting mechanism at the UN. It is states themselves who examine other states (as opposed to independent experts on the convention committees), with each country in the world reporting and being examined during a 4-year cycle. This means a great degree of politics enters into the process – both as peer pressure and as unholy alliances between countries with shared interests. But it also gives great room for civil society to play a role: in submitting a shadow report with additional information, and to put pressure on the either the examined or the examining states to focus on the critical issues.
For more information on how to understand and use the potentials of UPR as an instrument to put pressure on the State, please visit the homepage of the UPR.
Of interesting links here, we recommend to search the Documentation database, which can be done either by country or by theme. Like the UN human rights committees, there are documents here from past sessions that can be used for “naming and shaming”, as these are all publically accessible. Again, it must also be stressed that these documents are the outcomes of a highly politicised UN process.
More importantly and with and eye to the future, do keep pay attention to when your country is due to be examined, this you can see in the calendar as well as each sessions agenda. This is especially interesting as the process needs an input of data and here you can play a central role in organising the civil society of your country. The documents employed by the examining countries are 3 fold: the report of the country under review; the documents of the UN; and the submissions of National Human Rights Institutes and other stakeholder. The latter is where civil society can play an active role in mobilisation. Please therefore pay attention to the deadlines for submission and the technical guidelines.
