From 21st to 23rd September, the Human Rights Council will adopt the Reports of the Working Group of States reviewed during session 11 held last May. Those countries include, in order of adoption: Belgium, Denmark, Palau, Somalia, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Latvia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Suriname, Greece, Samoa, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sudan, Hungary and Papua New Guinea. So far only three States (Greece, Palau and Singapore) have presented an addendum containing their responses to recommendations. As South Sudan has become an independent State since the review of Sudan last May, it remains unclear what will become of the recommendations made by Norway, France and Italy on the issues of democracy, civil protection, child soldiers and death penalty addressed specifically to South Sudan.
The Civil Society Section of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a few weeks ago a tentative deadline for stakeholders submissions to the first session of the second cycle. Civil society organisations and national institutions are expected to send their submissions by 7 November 2011. The deadline is only "tentative" because the dates of session 13 have not been fixed yet. It should be held from 28 May to 8 June 2012. Countries to be reviewed at this 13th session of the UPR are the fourteen first countries under review at the UPR first session held in April 2008, in the same order: Bahrain, Ecuador, Tunisia, Morocco, Indonesia, Finland, the United Kingdom, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Algeria, Poland, the Netherlands and South Africa. The Czech Republic and Argentina will be reviewed at the fourteenth session in October 2012.
Documents for session 12 are already online on the OHCHR’s website and on UPR-info.org. The room booking for side events is now open at the following link.
At UPR Info, we uploaded the 2051 recommendations from session nine of the UPR Working Group (November 2010) in the database. This figure is in line with previous sessions - an average of 2000 recommendations have been made per session since the sixth session in December 2009 - and might thus represent the maximum number of recommendations that can be made during a session. The database now contains 14435 recommendations.
In the framework of our Follow-up Programme, we have published our first Mid-term Implementation Assessment (MIA) on Mali. Based on information received from the National Institution and a national NGO, we produced an assessment on the implementation by Mali of the recommendations received at their review in May 2008 detailing whether each recommendation was fully, partially or not implemented. The MIA for Mali can be downloaded here. We will publish new MIAs on a regular basis. We expect to make public very soon Bahamas, Botswana and Liechtenstein MIAs. Please check the Follow-up Programme webpage at http://www.upr-info.org/followup/. Do not hesitate to share broadly these assessments around your contacts. Comments are welcomed at followup@upr-info.org.
On Thursday 13 October, UPR Info will organise a conference on the end of the first cycle of the UPR co-hosted by the Permanent Mission of Switzerland, the Permanent Mission of Morocco and the Permanent Mission of the United Kingdom. The conference will aim at assessing the first cycle of the UPR and the improvements in human rights situations worldwide achieved through this mechanism as well as emphasizing the importance of the second cycle. Permanent Missions and observers in Geneva, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, National institutions and NGOs will be invited to the Conference due to take place Room XX in Palais des Nations and followed by a reception.
Finally, UPR Info was invited by East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders’ Project (EHAHRDP) to give a training with them in Kampala, Uganda from 23 to 26 August. Human rights defenders from Uganda and Tanzania were explained the UPR process and how to engage in relation to the review of their country in October. We seized this opportunity to interview a participant, Ms. Nabirye Justine Lubanga, Capacity Building and Network Development Officer at Human Rights Network - Uganda.