As articulated in its founding resolution, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations Human Rights Council aims to promote the universality, interdependence, indivisibility and interrelatedness of all human rights. This means, as Aoife Hegarty and Hans Fridlund recently pointed out, that the universality in its title is not only geographic, but also thematic. Despite this assertion, there has been a strong sense among various stakeholders involved in the UPR that economic, social, and cultural rights have been comparatively neglected in the Council’s reviews.
Recently, the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) and the Sciences Po Law Clinic undertook a quantitative trends analysis of UPR recommendations to explore whether this concern is well-founded. Specifically, we were interested in finding out how recommendations on economic, social and cultural rights compare to those on civil and political rights, in terms of their quantity and quality. To answer this question, we first identified broad trends in the full dataset of UPR recommendations maintained by the Geneva-based NGO, UPR Info. We then selected a sample of 21 countries that we re-coded to facilitate a more in-depth analysis (a full methodological note is annexed to the research paper).
