. 10th HRC session - 20 March 2009
“The United Kingdom made a voluntary commitment in June 2008 to provide a full progress report to the Human Rights Council next year on work we have done to implement the various recommendations we accepted. We will deliver on that pledge and offer a full mid term report next year. We would however, like to inform the HRC today that we have implemented one of the recommendations we rejected at the time of the adoption of our UPR report in June 2008. As recommended by Indonesia, we have lift two reservations to the Convention of the Rights of the Child and confirmed this in a letter to the Committee on the Rights of the Child in September 2008.”
. 11th HRC session - 12 June 2009
“I am pleased to inform the Council that the UK has made further progress to implement recommendations from our own review in April last year. On 8 June the UK ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We will shortly begin work in Parliament to ratify the Optional Protocol to that Convention.
We are plan to provide this Council with a comprehensive mid term report next year on our progress to implement all agreed recommendations.”
. 13th HRC session - 19 March 2010
“I am pleased to update the council on the progress the UK has made to implement the recommendations we accepted from our UPR in 2008. We are at the mid point and would like to follow the good example set by Bahrain and provide a progress report. I would like to highlight some examples of our progress:
We have taken action to reduce child poverty. The Child Poverty Bill, which is currently passing through the parliament, will enshrine in law the commitment to eradicate child poverty by 2020, defining targets, promoting measures to meet these targets and to hold current and future governments to account progress against them. It will also place a duty on local authorities to cooperate with partner authorities in tackling child poverty. The Welsh Assembly has passed a complementary statutory provision on this issue and the Scottish and Northern Ireland governments have produced policy frameworks to support their work in this area.
Similarly, legislation has been developed to further address discrimination on the basis of age. The Equality Bill will enhance our work to outlaw age discrimination and introduce a duty on the public sector to have regard to eliminating age discrimination.
New strategies have been produce across the UK to address the challenge of domestic violence.
We are also exploiting new and existing processes to address the challenge of protecting human rights and ensuring effective counter terrorism measures. Under the post legislative scrutiny process the Counter Terrorism Bill will be reviewed after five years. However the specific provision of 28 day pre-charge detention is subject to annual review by Parliament.
On a practical level we are addressing concerns about overcrowding in prisons, through an extensive building and refitting programme, providing more and improved facilities for both adult and young offenders.
Finally, the UK was unable to accept a recommendations at the time of our UPR to remove the two remaining reservations to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. However I am pleased to announce that after further consideration we were able to lift these reservations in 2008, and thereby implement an additional recommendation."
The following observers took the floor:
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