39 States commit to make only two recommendations per State under Review at the 2nd cycle

On March 16, during the Item 6 General Debate, 39 States committed to make only two recommendations to each State under Review (SuR) during the 2nd cycle of the UPR.

Algeria, taking the floor on behalf of the 39 States, reminded the Human Rights Council that, according to Resolution 5/1, "the UPR process should not be overly burdensome". The Algerian representative argued that in order for the mechanism to be effective, "a manageable number of high quality recommendations" should be given to each state under review, and made the following commitments on behalf of 39 states:

- Firstly, they committed to making each a maximum of two recommendations per country under review;
- Secondly, they agreed to always give "high quality Recommendations", i.e. "precise, practical, constructive, forward looking, and implementable";
- and, lastly, they reiterated their support to the mechanism.

Algeria also encouraged the grouping of "identical or nearly identical recommendations" as this practice could make the number of recommendations more manageable for the SuR, and emphasised the importance of technical assistance for the effective implementation of accepted recommendations.

In total, 5737 recommendations were made by these 39 countries during the first cycle, covering the 192 States under review. The average amount of recommendations made for each state is 2.44, which is close to the number of 2 that the States are committing to. However, there is a wide diversity among the 39 States. On the one hand, some countries, like Andorra and Monaco with a total of 0 and 1 recommendation respectively, are already making less than two recommendations per SuR. On the other hand, some States, such as Algeria with an average of 3.49 recommendations per state, Brazil with 4.1, the Netherlands with 3.49, and the United Kingdom with 3.46, are above this limit and will have to significantly reduce the number of recommendations they make.

UPR Info welcomes Algeria's statement as we believe that a smaller amount of high quality recommendations will improve the efficiency of the UPR mechanism.

The list of countries that made the aforementioned commitments include: Algeria, Andorra, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brazil, Botswana, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Colombia, the Republic of Congo, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Denmark, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Finland, Honduras, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Libya, Maldives, Moldova, Monaco, the Netherlands, Poland, Qatar, Romania Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Somalia, Sudan, Sweden, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Tunisia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.