OHCHR

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) was created in 1993 by General Assembly Resolution 48/141 and is headed by the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Its headquarters are based in the Palais Wilson in Geneva (Switzerland). The OHCHR also has offices in New York as well as eleven country offices and eight regional offices for a total of over a 1,000 staff working in 50 countries.

Country offices: Angola, Bolivia, Cambodia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Nepal, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Kosovo (Serbia), Togo, Uganda.

Regional offices: East Africa (Addis Ababa), Southern Africa (Pretoria), Central America (Panama City), Latin America (Santiago de Chile), South East Asia (Bangkok), the Middle East (Beirut), the Pacific (Suva), the Central Africa (Yaoundé))

The Ohchr also supports the work of the Treaty Bodies, Special Procedures and now the UPR mechanism.

High Commissioner

The High Commissioner is the highest person at the UN dealing with human rights. He/she is appointed by the Secretary-General on approval of the General Assembly. The current High Commissioner is Mrs. Navanethem (Navi) Pillay of South Africa. She succeedes to Mrs. Louis Arbour and will start her four-year mandate on September 1st 2008.

The mandate of the High Commissioner is defined in General Assembly resolution 48/141, inter alia:

 to promote and protect the effective enjoyment by all of all civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights;
 to carry out the tasks assigned to him/her by the competent bodies of the United Nations system in the field of human rights and to make recommendations to them with a view to improving the promotion and protection of all human rights;
 to provide, through the Centre for Human Rights of the Secretariat and other appropriate institutions, advisory services and technical and financial assistance, at the request of the State concerned and, where appropriate, the regional human rights organizations, with a view to supporting actions and programmes in the field of human rights;
 to coordinate relevant United Nations education and public information programmes in the field of human rights;
 to enhance international cooperation for the promotion and protection of all human rights;
 to coordinate the human rights promotion and protection activities throughout the United Nations system;
 to rationalize, adapt, strengthen and streamline the United Nations machinery in the field of human rights with a view to improving its efficiency and effectiveness.

Treaty Bodies

The HRC, UPR and Special Procedures are bodies based on the UN Charter. On the opposite, the Treaty Bodies are committees which monitor the implementation of the international treaties.

There are seven of them:
 Human Rights Committee (CCPR)
 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR)
 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)
 Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
 Committee Against Torture (CAT) & Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT) - Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture
 Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC)
 Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW)

The process works as follows: States, prior to the session wherein they will be examined, will submit a report on the human rights situation in the country regarding the specific treaty requirements. Reports can take different forms. In most Committees, the Group of Experts draws up a list of questions (the list of issues) the report has to address and they send it to the concerned State. The latter, in its report, has to answer these questions. During the examination, in the framework of the interactive dialogue, Committee members ask more questions on the report and raise points not included in the document.

Non-governmental Organisations are encouraged to submit the so-called Shadow Reports to provide experts with first hand information of the country’s situation. Shadow Reports are often quoted by experts during the sessions.

Committees all have different working methods and rules of procedures. They are composed of a number of independent experts, ranging from 10 (CAT, CMW) to 23 (CEDAW) but usually 18. They meet twice to three times a year (such as the CCPR and the CRC), in Geneva at the Palais Wilson, except for the CCPR which has its March session in New York. After 25 years, in New York, the CEDAW, in January 2008, has moved to Geneva and held its first session there.

Source: www.ohchr.org