Reforming the UN human rights protection procedures: a legal perspective on the establishment of the Universal Periodic Review mechanism

This chapter analyses the universal periodic review (UPR) mechanism of the Human Rights Council from a public international law perspective. In a system purely modelled by law, it argues that human rights protection would enjoy both clear standards and efficient monitoring mechanisms. The purpose of the chapter is to assess the substantive and procedural aspects of the new mechanism against these ideal features. While safeguarding human rights at the international level should entail clear substantive law, rather uncertain standards were adopted for the UPR. From a procedural point of view, the establishment of the UPR could lead to a questioning of the very existence of the human rights treaties' reporting system, which indicates that the time may have come to re-examine the different UN human rights procedures with a view to rationalizing them.