Held from 30 November to 11 December, the sixth session reviewed the following States: Albania, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Cyprus, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Norway and Portugal.

The session was marked by the absence of Cyprus from the adoption of its own report. Its review had witnessed strong discussions between the delegation, Turkey and Pakistan over the words used to denominated the island. Cyprus refused to endorsed the Report of the Working Group because of the inclusion of the summary of Turkey’s statement containing “non-UN terminology” and therefore was not present during the adoption.

The session was also the occasion for UPR Info to hold a side event on UPR recommendations. It was a great success with 50 attendees from delegations, NGOs and the OHCHR. Professor McMahon from the University of Vermont presented his analysis on the 6,000 UPR recommendations. He introduced the different categories of actions contained in the recommendations and their different use among regional groups.

On UPR-info.org, we are continuing our efforts to reach out civil societies. To this end, after translating the whole website into Spanish, we now have a basic version in Russian. This version contains only explanations of the process and the role of States and civil societies but will allow Russian-speaking UPR actors to access information on the UPR.

On the same line, as announced in the previous newsletter, we have now our documents “Responses to recommendations” in French for French-speaking countries: Algeria, Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Djibouti, France, Gabon, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Morocco, Switzerland, Tonga, Tunisia and Vanuatu. This will also enable the civil society in those countries to fully engage in the follow-up.