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Reflections on UN Special Procedures

December 10, 2021 GJA Admin Asia, Blog, Global Justice Academy, Human rights, UN

On 4 November 2021, the Global Justice Academy together with the Edinburgh Centre for Global and International Law hosted their first in-person seminar for the 2021-22 academic year at Edinburgh Law School. Professor Rhona K.M. Smith, who served two three-year terms as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Cambodia, engaged the audience with her reflections on UN Special Procedures. She is a Professor of International Human Rights and was head of Newcastle Law School at Newcastle University from 2016 to 2020.

UN human rights envoy Rhona Smith holds a press conference at the conclusion of her mission to the Kingdom yesterday. KT/Khem Sovannara

To ground her reflections, she opened with an overview on the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, and the distinctions between country and thematic mandates. She took the audience through the procedures for appointing the mandate holders and gave insight into gender and geographical balances and imbalances. Many in the audience were shocked to hear about the amount of time a UN Special Rapporteur dedicates to their mandate and particularly in light of the fact it is an unpaid position. Prof Smith critically reflected on the reasons given by the UN Human Rights Council for maintaining the unremunerated status of these roles. The Human Rights Council asserts that this gives independence to the experts, however, Prof Smith recognized that, in reality, not all experts or potential experts could afford this privilege. Ultimately, she said ‘you need money to live’. This subject stimulated a lively discussion later in the session.

The core of Prof Smith’s discussion focused on her behind-the-scenes experiences as a Special Rapporteur. She elaborated the three main roles of UN Special Procedures: advising, monitoring and reporting. Each of these roles serves a specific purpose in relation to fulfilling the mandate and each is enabled or limited in direct relation to the resources allocated to facilitate the work.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) plays a fundamental role is supporting the UN Special Procedures mandates. Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, Prof Smith travelled on missions to Cambodia twice a year and reinforced the importance of communicating with the country through the OHCHR. Security measures were of upmost importance as every UN Special Procedure faces common death threats and other harassment. During missions, Prof Smith was able to gather information on the ground and meet with high-level government actors in order to develop a multilayered picture of human rights in Cambodia. She reflected on how she could make the most out of these visits because she knew the country already since she had lived there before being appointed to the UN mandate. During these meetings, she highlighted situations that would entail human rights violations, and suggested concrete actions that State actors could adopt to protect, respect and fulfil the human rights of people living in Cambodia.

In the end, Prof Smith reinforced that being a UN Special Procedure was both ‘a huge honour and an amazing challenge’. On the one side, she was able to deepen her knowledge of human rights in practice and steer the improvement of the human rights for Cambodians. On the other, she faced the challenge of becoming a public figure in Cambodia and the risks associated with that publicity.

In closing the event, Prof Smith narrated a day in the shoes of a UN Special Procedure during a mission and reflected on how her experience contributed to her human rights teaching. Her frankness and honesty helped the audience understand what it means to be a UN Special Rapporteur. While there are clearly challenges, the rewards in assuming such a role within the UN, she demonstrated the practical importance that UN Special Procedures play in advancing the global protection, promotion and respect for human rights.

This post was written by Valentina Rioseco Vallejos. Valentina is a Chilean lawyer who holds an LLM in Human Rights from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently studying a PhD in Law, focused on incorporating a human rights approach to irregular migration. Valentina is a Research Assistant for the Global Justice Academy.

Events, Human Rights, Newspost, OHCHR, United Nations

De-Mystifying The G-Word: Enforcement and Success of the Genocide Convention

November 2, 2020 GJA Admin Africa, Atrocities, Balkans, Conflict, Genocide, Human rights, Students participate!, Teaching, UN

UN Photo/Evan Schneider – 70th Anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

This post by is by Oskar Granskogen Kjorstad, Alexandra Haider and Tess Gallagher. They are students enrolled in PLIT10063 ‘Human Rights in International Relations’, an honours-level course in the School of Social and Political Sciences that explores the political and legal issues surrounding the international enforcement of human rights. As part of their online tutorial activities, students were asked to prepare a blog post about the enforcement of the Genocide Convention. This piece was selected as the standout among the many excellent submissions, chosen for its incisive commentary on the Darfur crisis and its excellent discussion of the Convention’s broader application.

There is no shortage of forgotten conflicts in history that briefly capture the world’s attention on their way through the news cycle before the next noteworthy event promptly takes their place in the spotlight. Darfur is an especially painful example of such a conflict. State-supported and ethnically motivated violence against the civilian population of Darfur has caused enormous suffering. Yet despite calls from civil society for states to intervene on the grounds that they are obligated to under the Genocide Convention, the international community took no meaningful action to stop the violence. What explains the apathy of the international community and the difficulty of enforcing the Genocide Convention in relation to Darfur?

One of the most basic problems with the enforcement of the Genocide Convention is the difficulty of consistently and accurately applying the legal definition of genocide to cases of mass violence. The Genocide Convention defines genocide as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. Different international courts have variously understood this definition. In Srebrenica, the ICTY ruled that the murder of 7-8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys met the legal definition of genocide, though this case was less obviously a genocide than the Holocaust, which led to the Convention. In spite of the wide span in cases identified as genocides, the ICC determined that the violence in Darfur did not amount to “the crime of crimes”- not because the violence was less horrific than expected, but because the particular nature of the violence was deemed not to meet the legal definition of genocide. The U.S., as well as many NGOs and scholars, reached the opposite conclusion. This lack of legal clarity makes it harder to effectively identify cases of genocide, which is a problem in the enforcement of the Genocide Convention. Confusion caused by these legal debates can be used as an excuse by states not to use the word “genocide”, and so avoid pressure to act and subsequent legal obligations to end mass-atrocities.

If the definitional issue is overcome, another obstacle as to why the Genocide Convention is so rarely invoked lies in the semantic power of the word. Sardonically labelled ‘The G Word’, there is often a reluctance to utilise the word for fear of its connotations. Many argue that the term denotes absolute, totemic evil and thus should be treated with caution when used in political discourse. As a result, it is often replaced with other, more (supposedly) palatable alternatives, such as ‘ethnic-cleansing’. Examples of this were seen in the US’ refusal to condemn and recognise the Armenian Genocide; choosing instead to refer to it by the Armenian language phrase ‘Meds Yeghern’, or ‘Great Catastrophe’. This was not without external pressure- such power does the word have that US officials were threatened with losing access to military bases in Turkey if they were to vocalise it. Of course, strategic imperatives often trump moral ones; and evasive terminology in this case appeared the only way to conciliate all sides.

Once the word is invoked however, the game appears to change. If word is weapon, does saying it signify battle? In cases such as Darfur, it appears not. Despite internationalcondemnation and adducing of the Genocide Convention, the violence in Sudan still continues. Numerous resolutions have passed all with limited, if not weak, success. This leads many scholars and critics to question the legitimacy of the Genocide Convention; does it exist to appease, rather than to act?

Given the poor track record of the state system in preventing genocides, there’s a good case to be made for the former. A key explanation for this is that states put their self-interest above their obligation to prevent and punish genocide. States may circumscribe their response in ways that falls short of stopping the atrocities because they don’t see total involvement as self-serving. Upon examination of the crisis in Darfur, this fundamental challenge to the enforcement of the Convention is evident. While the U.S. publicly recognised the crisis as a genocide, Secretary of State Colin Powell asserted that,

UN Photo/Evan Schneider

since the U.S. was already putting political pressure on authorities in Khartoum to halt the violence and was providing humanitarian aid to civilians, nothing more was required of it; the U.S. did not have to act to the extent that the Convention required because it was already pursuing narrow unilateral action. Similarly, although it is not formally labeled a genocide, Kurds are being killed en masse in Syria. While the U.S. has supported Kurdish rebels in the past, President Trump pulled American troops out of Syria in October 2019 on the basis that the conflict had “nothing to do with [the U.S.]”, effectively leaving the Kurds without means to protect themselves. A problem that feeds into this is the absence of a clear enforcement mechanism to make states comply with their obligation to prevent genocide. All states are equally obliged to prevent genocide, which leads to a bystander effect by which no one feels obliged to make the first move.

These are some of the reasons why Darfur stands as a painful reminder of the difficulty and political unwillingness of keeping the promise of “never again”.

Armenia, Darfur, ethnic-cleansing, Genocide, Genocide Convention, United Nations