Session 6 was an intensive review. 119 States took the floor and made 750 statements. This resulted to an average number of 6.3 statements per States, a figure ranking between session 5 (5.6) and session 4 (6.7). Human Rights Council (HRC) members, as always, accounted for slightly more than half of the statements made (51.3%) during the session despite representing only a third of States taking the floor (37.8%). Among HRC members, only Madagascar and Zambia did not take the floor. With regards to regional groups, the WEOG was again the most active in terms of statements made (as it was during sessions 1 to 3 and 5) and the Asian group in terms of States taking the floor (as it was during sessions 2 to 5).

The events in Haiti also have repercussion on the UPR. During the HRC Special session on Haiti, Haiti’s delegation asked that its review be postponed. This proposal was backed by numerous States and accepted by the HRC. The resolution passed during the session decided to “postpone relevant deadlines related to its Universal Periodic Review within the Human Rights Council to a date no later than December 2011”.

On UPR-info, our work on making the website available in different languages is progressing. After Russian, you will soon be able to access a basic version of upr-info.org in Arabic. We will also soon translate our documents “Issues analysis” into Spanish and French.

On another note, we are developing at the moment a page dedicated to trainings on the UPR organised both in Geneva and worldwide.

Finally, we are now finalising the last details of our database on UPR recommendations which will be available in March!