United Nations Human Rights Committee

The United Nations Human Rights Committee is a United Nations body of 18 experts that meets three times a year for four-week sessions (spring session at UN headquarters in New York, summer and fall sessions at the UN Office in Geneva) to consider the five-yearly reports submitted by 162 UN member states on their compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ICCPR, and to examine individual petitions concerning 112 States parties to the Optional Protocol.

The Committee is one of nine UN human rights treaty bodies, each responsible for overseeing the implementation of a particular treaty.

States that have ratified or acceded to the First Optional Protocol (currently 114 countries) have agreed to allow persons within their jurisdiction to submit complaints to the Committee requesting a determination whether provisions of the Covenant have been violated. For those countries, the Human Rights Committee functions as a mechanism for the international redress of human rights abuses, similar to the regional mechanisms afforded by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights or the European Court of Human Rights. The First Optional Protocol entered into force on 23 March 1976.

The Second Optional Protocol, in force since 11 July 1991, addresses the abolition of the death penalty and has 74 states parties.

The Human Rights Committee should not be confused with the more high-profile Commission on Human Rights, a Charter-based mechanism, or its replacement, the Human Rights Council. Whereas the Commission on Human Rights was a political forum where states debated all human rights concerns (since June 2006, replaced by the Council in that function), the Human Rights Committee is a treaty-based mechanism where a group of experts examines reports and rules on individual communications pertaining only to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It remains disputed whether the Human Rights Committee's "Views under article 5(4) of the Optional Protocol" qualify as decisions of a quasi-judicial body or simply constitute authoritative interpretations on the merits of the cases brought before them.

The members of the Human Rights Committee, who must be "of high moral character and recognized competence in the field of human rights", are elected by the member states but on an individual basis, not as representatives of their countries. They serve four-year terms, with one-half of their number elected every second year at the General Assembly.

Read more about United Nations Human Rights Committee:  Individual Complaints (Communications) To The Committee, Members, State Reporting Under The ICCPR

Famous quotes containing the words united, nations, human, rights and/or committee:

    Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.
    Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)

    And who in time knowes whither we may vent
    The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
    This gaine of our best glorie shal be sent,
    T’inrich unknowing Nations with our stores?
    What worlds in th’yet unformed Occident
    May come refin’d with th’accents that are ours?
    Samuel Daniel (c. 1562–1619)

    Worst of all, there is no sign of any relaxation of antisemitism. Logically it has nothing to do with Fascism. But the human race is imitative rather than logical; and as Fascism spreads antisemitism spreads.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

    It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we’re all so bummed out.
    Elizabeth Wurtzel, U.S. author. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, p. 298, Houghton Mifflin (1994)

    In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a “dictator” substitutes himself for the central committee.
    Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)