The UN Human Rights Council, a Practical Anatomy by Eric Tistounet (review)

Since 1946, the United Nations has sought to advance the cause of human rights. The Commission on Human Rights, envisioned in the UN Charter, held its first session in 1947 at an old gyroscope factory at Lake Success, New York, with the main task to write the International Bill of Rights. Until its extinction six decades later, the Commission adopted a large variety of international human rights instruments and promoted new avenues for monitoring violations in member states, foundations upon which the international community built the current international human rights system.

The results have been variable and often hard to specify with precision. Over the years, an extremely complex and somewhat inaccessible administrative structure has grown up. The new and the old continue living together through vicissitudes, crises and rearrangements in the UN human rights system. A Human Rights Council, in Geneva, replaced the Commission in 2006.

It is that complex stage where Eric Tistounet sets his extraordinary book The UN Human Rights Council, a Practical Anatomy. Tistounet has worked within the secretariat of the Council since its establishment and is better placed than anyone to unveil the Council's real functioning.

Since its foundation, the Council's mandate to monitor human rights in member states around the world continues to be a difficult task because the implementation of human rights is permanently subjected to the limitations and existing contradictions in the situation of world affairs. We must never forget that the Council is a multilateral body constituted by representatives of states which always try to protect their interests. Seeing representatives of governments criticize the action of other government, Sérgio Vieira de Mello once said that "it was like fish criticizing each other for being wet,"¹ because the political nature of international human rights bodies is an essential element in their functioning. The full depoliticization of the Council will never be achieved. It is wholly unrealistic to expect that the Council can be a sort of spaceship floating above reality, full of righteous saviors rescuing victims of abuse, freed from politics and hypocrisy, moved only by ethics. On the other hand, international bureaucratic organizations, despite being under the control exercised by states, function in practice with relative autonomy. Observing their rituals and proceedings we can learn a lot about ongoing social and political processes playing out in the international arena.

Notwithstanding these constraints, the Council has continued the work of the former Commission, preparing new conventions, considering human rights situations in various countries, and developing new investigative mechanisms. In addition, there were decisive innovations that Tistounet describes and evaluates.

The Council has been elevated to the status of a subsidiary body of the UN General Assembly, now with forty-seven members instead of fifty-three at the Commission, strengthening the representation of African and Asian states while weakening others. Instead of a single annual meeting, the Council has come to have a semi-permanent status, holding three sessions a year, with a total duration of at least ten weeks. As Tistounet said at the tenth anniversary of the Council, it operates like a theatrical event, with message, audience, and setting so that "we have moved from a short play with adequate intermissions to long operas without a pause."²

The Council has established several commissions of inquiry to serve as independent fact-finding bodies to investigate grave violations of human rights, including crimes against humanity, and to identify perpetrators for the purpose of holding them accountable. Tistounet examines the commission on Syria, established in 2011 and still in existence, as one of the many examples of the multifaceted processes in the Council.

The role of the HRC in responding promptly to human rights emergencies, has been strengthened with the possibility of holding Special Sessions and Urgent Debates on human rights crises in specific countries. In Syria alone, there were Special Sessions in 2011, 2012, and 2016. These sessions exposed the pattern of war crimes by all sides in that...