Back to School

I’ve never liked this time of year. It always invokes my childhood dread of going back to school without having done any of my homework for the summer holidays. Each year I promised myself I’d change and be more organised the following summer. But I never was.

On Monday the Human Rights Council begins its September session and formally marks the end of another Geneva summer. Not that it’s been much of a break for those of us working on human rights. The appalling events in Syria prompted the Council to meet in Special Session for the second time in five months to condemn the Assad regime. The Council passed an extremely strong resolution  and highlighted the findings by a UN investigation team that crimes against humanity seem to have occurred in Syria. A fully fledged UN Commission of Inquiry will now document the killings, torture and other atrocities which continue to escalate.

Since the ‘Arab spring’ we’ve seen many more states  take an active role in the Council with an increasing trend to work  across traditional regional divides to respond to the worst violations going on in countries. This is a major step forward for human rights at the UN. This time round  it was impressive to see Saudi Arabia joining the call for the Special Session and to see all Arab member of the Council as well as Indonesia, Botswana, Senegal, Benin and Nigeria join in the condemnation of the on-going violations. With only Russia, Cuba, China and the increasingly hard-line Ecuador voting against the resolution, it is clear that Assad is running out of friends fast.

In another part of the Human Rights jungle, the UN Committee on the Elimination Against Racial Discrimination met to examine the UK’s recent record on upholding it’s international obligations on racial equality. The Committee seemed reasonably impressed by some areas of progress since they last looked at the UK in 2003, though  of course no country is a perfect and the Committee offered a substantial list of recommendations for further improvements.

I also spent quite a lot of the last few weeks bidding fond farewells to departing colleagues during another summer exodus. The longer I stay here the harder I find it is to say goodbye to colleagues and the more I start to feel like Christopher Lambert in Highlander, stuck in my eternal youth as my colleagues around me slowly fade away (except, as my wife never tires of telling me, every year I have a few more grey hairs).

This summer feels particularly difficult as my colleague Becky is going back to London after four and half years as head of the UK human rights team. For those of you familiar with Manchester United’s fortunes before the Premier League, she’s been our equivalent of Bryan Robson: bravely leading us all through the long dark years of the Council but forced to call it a day, just as we’ve started to find some success. All the best to you and your family Becky and to Jeff, Mutaz,  Pauline, Krista, Mark and everyone else leaving who made the Human Rights Council a better place.

This session, the UK will be running a resolution with Brazil looking at the linkages between human rights and Olympic values as part of the build up to the London 2012 games. I’m hoping this will culminate in Human Rights Council members taking part in a mini Olympics in Geneva with Ambassadors going head to head to settle some old scores.

There’ll be plenty of more traditional human rights resolutions for the human rights purists, with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights set to raise the curtain tomorrow morning with a statement reflecting on how human rights have changed in the world since September 11 2001. Each Council session has its surprises but of the resolutions coming up, the one on Sudan looks set to be among the most difficult issues, with many countries seemingly inclined to take a softer stance following South Sudan’s secession from the north. But with many serious violations ongoing in Sudan and the recent large scale killings and displacement in Southern Kordofan, it would be an awful mistake to end monitoring of the human rights situation in the country at the moment.

Well, that’s the closest I’ve ever come to doing my homework on time, though I’m writing this late on a Sunday night and if I don’t do some chores I’m soon going to be in trouble with  Mrs Bob who is much more important than my school teachers ever were. I’ll be back in week to let you know how things are looking.
In the meantime, as always I’d be happy to receive any of your comments.