The policy decision to replace the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights (CHR) with a new UN Human Rights Council (HRC) was taken by governments at the September 2005 World Summit and adopted as a General Assembly (GA) resolution on 15 March 2006.1 This brought an end to the CHR's chequered 60-year history.2 The membership, structure and aims and procedures of the new HRC underwent months of intense discussion between States in the lead up to the adoption of this resolution. The purpose of this note is to explain the various proposals explored in the shaping of the HRC and the extent to which the resolution bringing it into being responded to weaknesses perceived in the CHR. Since almost every reference to the CHR came to be prefaced by the term ‘discredited’ since 2005, the question is to what extent the reasons for the loss of legitimacy in the CHR were actually addressed in the crafting of the new HRC.
The purpose of this article is to give attention to the concept of racist hate speech and particularly to the fact of its complexity and inseparability from a wider spectrum of hatred. Using the methodology of intersectionality, this article encourages the CERD Committee's continued but cautious engagement in relation to racist hate speech. This article is a lightly modified version of a paper the author was invited to present at the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination's day of thematic discussion on Racist Hate Speech, held during CERD's eighty-first session on 28 August 2012 in Geneva.
In recent years, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have been increasingly willing to ratify United Nations human rights instruments. This article examines the underlying rationales for these ratifications and the limited range and drivers of subsequent domestic reforms post ratification. Drawing on both a quantitative analysis of engagement with the UN treaty bodies and Charter-based mechanisms in over 120 UN reports and qualitative interviews with over sixty-five government officials, members of civil society, National Human Rights Institutions, lawyers, and judges from all six states, this article argues that in the GCC states, UN human rights treaty ratification results from a desire to increase standing in the international community. Treaty ratification has limited effects driven by international socialization and cautious leadership preferences.
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