The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: Conscience for the World ed. by Felice D. Gaer & Christen L. Broecker (review)

The position of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was created at the end of 1993 by a unanimous vote in the United Nations General Assembly. The creation of this office was preceded by strong lobbying by NGOs (particularly Amnesty International) and state delegations (primarily the United States) during the Second World Conference on Human Rights, known as the Vienna Conference, in June of 1993.

Throughout the Cold War, several negotiation attempts to create this office were hampered, on the one hand by the bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union—and consequently between the so-called “generations” of human rights—and on the other hand by the still incipient institutional strengthening of the international human rights system. The end of the Cold War, the “thawing” of the UN, and the consolidation of NGOs as international political agents established the conditions for the emergence of this position, which from then on assumed primary responsibility for human rights within the entire political-institutional framework of the UN.

Despite the centrality of the position for the institutionalization of human rights within the UN and the fact that, bureaucratically, it has the rank of Under-Secretary General, there are very few studies and analyses on the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the office in the international literature. In this respect, this book is an extremely welcome addition to the small number of other titles on the topic, such as the works of Bertrand Ramcharan and the pioneering doctoral thesis by Roger Clark in 1972.

As stated above, the book has its merits. The first, doubtlessly, is its originality. The second is the attempt to cover the most varied aspects of the High Commissioner and the office. In addition to the introduction written by the editors, the book is divided into five well balanced parts.

The first part discusses the expectations concerning the work of the mandate holder and the office, analyzing its twenty five years of existence and making recommendations for its future. Besides the articles by the current High Commissioner, Navi Pillay, and the former High Commissioner, Ramcharan, the reflections of Michael Ignatieff on the possibilities for increasing the duties of the High Commissioner and of Harold Koh on the personification and institutionalization process contribute to the literature in the area.

The second part addresses a recurring theme in the literature on human rights: universality. The authors in this section, Michael O’Flaherty and Sunila Abeysekera, focus on how the High Commissioner operationalizes and promotes the principle of universality, or fails to do so, in its work, particularly in relation to the committees that monitor compliance with international human rights treaties (known as Treaty Bodies).

In the third part, one of the main contributions of the collection starts to emerge: the little known or studied responses of the Office of the High Commissioner to systematic human rights violations. Felice Gaer, who is extremely knowledgeable about the UN human rights system, recommends that there should be more synergy and cooperation and less disputing and rivalry between the work of the High Commissioner and the Special Procedures. Christen Broecker and William O’Neill make a panoramic analysis of the work conducted by the High Commissioner’s national offices, located in several different countries around the world, demonstrating the political-institutional potential and difficulties of giving local significance to international human rights standards. Tseliso Thipanyane wraps up the third part by describing the relationship between the National Human Rights Institutions and the High Commissioner, the leading enthusiast of these institutions within the institutional framework of the UN.

The fourth part is interesting in that it responds to the more skeptical literature concerning the political influences of the UN human rights bodies. Suzanne Nossel and Broecker show how the institutional maturity of the position of High Commissioner...