By contrast, the Council is a political body of 47 states that discusses human rights conditions in the world. It is meant to be putting global politics at the service of an international human rights agenda, though at times it has been accused of shoehorning human rights issues to fit the political agenda of its members.
Can a committee of experts, with limited public exposure, meagre resources (we meet for only 12 weeks a year) and few legal powers actually make a dent in the world’s very serious human rights problems?
The answer is that the Committee often has real influence over states, but this is certainly not always the case and its record of achievement even with states it can influence is mixed.
Through engaging in an ongoing legalistic dialogue with states, the Committee has been able to prod many states to adjust their laws and practices to conform with international law standards and best practices.
The move towards abolishing the death penalty in multiple countries throughout the world, especially in the developing countries; the passage of new domestic laws against torture and sexual violence; the gradual extension of anti-discrimination laws to LGBTs; and shorter pre-trial detention periods, are a small part of a long list of positive changes that the Committee has helped to bring about.
The Committee has also pressured Western democracies like Ireland, Australia and Denmark to reconsider their policies in politically sensitive areas such as abortion, gay marriage and immigration, with varying degrees of success.
The combination of serious professional engagement, positive interaction with and public opinion, and the megaphone effect provided by the Committee to victims of human rights violations partly explains these successes.
At the same time, the lack of engagement from states hostile to international human rights law, the lack of an effective domestic constituency to cooperate within those states, and the utter powerlessness of victims of severe oppression all explain the inability of the Committee to do more for victims of many global human rights situations.
As the new Chair of the Committee, I plan to try and increase its ability to promote and protect human rights, especially in regions of the world where the basic conditions for upholding human rights are lacking.
Enhancing the Committee’s international profile would make more states listen to its recommendations and make it harder for them to ignore us and disengage. Increasing the resources available to the Committee would help with its victim complaints backlog and tackle those states — often with problematic human rights records — lagging in their reporting obligations.
Given the centrality of human rights in the world, there is no possibility of removing it from international politics. and I believe that the Human Rights Council, for all its many shortcoming and need of reform, can play a positive role in raising the political costs of violating human rights.
Yet those who care about tangible ways to advance the legal protection of human rights throughout the world ought to pay more attention to the work of professional international bodies like the Human Rights Committee, which, without much political fanfare, constantly push states to do better and implement their human rights obligations in full.
Yuval Shany is a professor of law and was the first Israeli to be elected chair of the UN Human Rights Committee in July 2018. He is also the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in Public International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Vice President for Research at the Israel Democracy Institute.
