Patrick Stickney
Patrick Stickney is a Resident Forum Blogger covering recent developments in domestic and international human rights issues.
On September 24, 2015, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted the final outcome report for the United States under the Universal Period Review (UPR) process. The UPR process is a relatively new human rights mechanism created to increase respect for human rights among the member states while avoiding confrontational and politicized proceedings that have plagued previous similar efforts. The process consists of three stages: review, implementation, and reporting. Together, these stages create a continuous cycle of human rights monitoring. After finishing the first cycle of member state reporting in 2011, the process is now in its second round.
To prepare for its second report, the United States started in October 2014 with a period of information gathering from civil society actors. After consulting with these groups the United States then submitted a report in February 2015 to the Human Rights Council. The report detailed the United States’ current domestic human rights situation, discussing these situations in relation to the recommendations it received after the last UPR in 2010, and included the progress that had been made since the last review. The language used in the report is generously optimistic about the domestic human rights situation.
Under the UPR process, civil society organizations are encouraged to participate in the review, not only by communicating with the government, but by submitting their own reports to be disseminated to the countries involved in the UPR process. Because civil society organizations are not concerned with describing human rights situations in as favorable of a light as the federal government, their reports allow states to have more detailed information about what is happening in the reviewed country. The importance of these reports is also demonstrated in part by the fact that some of the information contained in these reports end up in the recommendations other countries give to the United States. Additionally, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights provides member states with information from the human rights treaty bodies and special procedures relevant to the country under review. This information includes details about specific treaties the country has not ratified, the results from visits of human rights experts appointed by the Council (special rapporteurs), and conclusions from reports mandated by the treaties to which the United States is already a party.
Once reports were submitted, the United States had to affirmatively recognize the recommendations and adopt a position on each of them. Of the 343 recommendations, the United States supported 156 in full, 104 in part, and did not support 83.
The United States organized nearly all the recommendations into five thematic areas:
(1) civil rights and non-discrimination;
(2) criminal justice;
(3) economic, social, and cultural rights and measures; indigenous issues; and the environment;
(4) national security; and
(5) immigration, migrants, trafficking, labor, and children.
Within these thematic areas, there were some recommendations in particular which were echoed by multiple member states. Twenty-two states had recommendations about ending police brutality and racial discrimination in policing (seventeen supported by the United States and the other five supported in part), thirty-eight regarding the death penalty (seven which were supported or supported in part and thirty-one the United States did not support, regarding the abolishment of the death penalty), and thirteen on closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay (six the United States supported and seven supported in part). The United States also received numerous recommendations to ratify the human rights treaties it has not yet become a party to, and to establish a national human rights institution. Whether the United States supported treaty ratification depended on the individual treaty, but the United States did not support any recommendation to establish a national human rights institution.
Although the report has been adopted, there is little indication that these recommendations will actually be implemented. While the United States will be asked about its progress during the next reporting cycle, international pressure alone is unlikely to cause much change in improving the domestic human rights situation, especially if progress fares as well as it did after the United States’ first UPR report. Following the first reporting cycle, the federal government created a working group for each thematic area to implement the recommendations, but largely failed in leveraging them to create any substantial forward movement. The UPR process is helpful in categorizing the human rights deficiencies in each state under review, but without engagement and pressure from domestic civil society organizations, these recommendations are unlikely to create any legal or policy changes in the United States.
Published on November 17, 2015