In 2016 the UN Human Rights Council will celebrate its tenth birthday. Although the anniversary—unlike the Council’s five-year mark—will not be accompanied by any formal review of its work and functioning, it represents an important opportunity to take stock of the UN body’s achievements and failures. And what is immediately clear is that although the Council is good at debating human rights, it pays very little attention to how those rights are violated in specific countries.
At one level—looking solely at its popularity and the seriousness with which states engage with it—the Council has unarguably been a great success. A casual visitor to its 28th session in March would have noted record levels of enthusiasm for and engagement with the Council. After a high-level segment that saw a plethora of heads of state, prime ministers, and foreign ministers —including Sergei Lavrov and John Kerry—address Council member states, delegations buckled down to work through an increasingly packed agenda, marked by ever more resolutions, panel debates, and interactive dialogues with Special Procedures.
Over the eight years and 27 regular sessions since its creation, the Council adopted a total of 762 texts, the vast majority of them resolutions (these were not distributed evenly over time: for example, in 2006 the Council adopted 43 texts, while in 2013 it adopted 112). Similar exponential growth has been witnessed in the number of panel debates (rising from 2 in 2007 to 23 in 2014), Special Procedures mandates (now over 50, with 74 mandate holders), and reports commissioned from the High Commissioner or Secretary-General (over 450 presented to the Council since 2007). Another measure of the popularity is the fact that, after the Security Council, a seat on the Human Rights Council is one of the most sought-after membership positions at the UN.
