This chapter examines the various mechanisms within the United Nations that deal with human rights. The chapters focus is on the Universal Periodic Review mechanism, but in the process addresses the work of the UN General Assembly, the human rights function of the Security Council through its peace and security mandate, and crucially also of the revamped Human Rights Commission. The chapter looks at the history of its predecessor and assesses how we arrived at the current architecture. The chapter examines specialized procedures, as well as the work of thematic rapporteurs and human rights working groups.

Far from resulting from a rational design, the Human Rights Council is in fact a perpetual work in progress. In terms of policymaking practices, the level of open-endedness and the role of trial and error in the institutionalization of this UN body is particularly striking. The making of the HRC is testimony to the prevalence of bricolage in global public policymaking: even its anchoring practice, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), is subject to unending revisions. In terms of value debates, this chapter shows how the consensus against the politicization of human rights, which originally led to the demise of the COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS, actually hides deep cleavages over universality, equal treatment, and dialog. A lot of these debates pit the North against the South, although the lines demarcating these two camps are often blurred. Today’s HRC forms an amazing bricolage of governance practices and universal values, one characterized by constant adaptation and constructive ambiguity.

Since 2008 the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism of the UN Human Rights Council has become a fixture of the international human rights regime, reviewing the human rights record of every single state once every few years. Over the course of the UPR reviews to date thousands of recommendations have been issued about the protection of human rights with a growing body of evidence showing that states modify their behaviour in response to the outcome of reviews. This chapter analyses how UPR recommendations can be used to identify customary international law. Using the discussion on the identification of custom in General Assembly resolutions as a starting point the chapter examines how scholarship on the identification of custom has argued that there are a different set of rules for the identification of customary international human rights law. Identifying custom in UPR recommendations can help resolve some of the ambiguities and contradictions in relation to the identification of customary international human rights law. This chapter concludes by outlining a three-part model for identifying custom in UPR recommendations which would complement existing rules for identifying customary international law.

Chapter 5 investigates China’s participation in the International Labour Organization’s Conference Committee on the Application of Standards, where its taker behavior can be attributed mainly to the lack of scrutiny it received from this Committee.This chapter unveils an instrumental aspect of Beijing’s behavior, exposing that beginning in the late 1990s, the PRC began using this venue to speak in defense of friendly countries during their reviews before the ILC.By analyzing the votes and statements of these countries in the UNCHR and HRC, I show that Beijing appears to have benefited from reciprocal treatment as these countries frequently voted against resolutions on China’s record and offered protective statements during the PRC’s Universal Periodic Review before the HRC.This behavior suggests that even though the PRC was a taker in this Committee, its actions did not necessarily uphold the principles undergirding the regime.

This chapter connects analyses of transnational legal orders with research in field sociology and cultural sociological work on performance and power. Research on transnational legal orders opens up the opportunity to study processes of legal change that focus on status enhancement, networks, and peer review, in addition to more formal processes of legal regulation, enforcement, and compliance. We do so by focusing on human rights recommendations regarding rape and sexual violence, within the context of the UN’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The UPR process is uniquely suited to studying global norms, since the materials reviewed include national state reports, civil society reports, and a compiled report from international institutions – and within a peer review framework, states then respond by either accepting or merely noting the recommendations they receive. Through multiple correspondence analysis, we geometrically map out distinct groups of states involved in the process, and using a series of growth curve models, we show that recommendation acceptance is partially driven by particular types of states interacting within the UPR. In so doing, we develop connecting points between research on transnational legal orders, field sociology, and cultural sociology in order to better understand the performance of human rights.

The human rights movement is by no means uniform and a series of challenges, both within the movement and in respect of its role as a political actor, have become more pronounced with the increasing power of human rights and its advocates. This development has cast the light on human rights advocates, such as NGOs, and has raised questions both of legitimacy – who are you to make claims in the name of human rights or on behalf of certain people? Are you living up to human rights principles in your own practice? – and effectiveness – are you really making the positive difference in people’s lives you claim to make? Responses to these challenges testify to a growing self-awareness and critical assessment of the nature of human rights work, which includes an evaluation of the efficacy of strategies used to promote and protect human rights. Inevitably, human rights advocates are increasingly drawn into the political domain and are faced with the difficult task of marrying principle with pragmatism. This chapter explores the tensions arising in these contexts and assesses the strategies used by human rights actors, namely documentation, human rights reporting, advocacy, awareness-raising, training and education and, where relevant, litigation