The United Nations Human Rights Committee is a United Nations body of 18 experts that meets three times a year for four-week sessions (spring session at UN headquarters in New York, summer and fall sessions at the UN Office in Geneva) to consider the five-yearly reports submitted by 162 UN member states on their compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ICCPR, and to examine individual petitions concerning 112 States parties to the Optional Protocol.
The Committee is one of nine UN human rights treaty bodies, each responsible for overseeing the implementation of a particular treaty.
States that have ratified or acceded to the First Optional Protocol (currently 114 countries) have agreed to allow persons within their jurisdiction to submit complaints to the Committee requesting a determination whether provisions of the Covenant have been violated. For those countries, the Human Rights Committee functions as a mechanism for the international redress of human rights abuses, similar to the regional mechanisms afforded by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights or the European Court of Human Rights. The First Optional Protocol entered into force on 23 March 1976.
The Second Optional Protocol, in force since 11 July 1991, addresses the abolition of the death penalty and has 74 states parties.
The Human Rights Committee should not be confused with the more high-profile Commission on Human Rights, a Charter-based mechanism, or its replacement, the Human Rights Council. Whereas the Commission on Human Rights was a political forum where states debated all human rights concerns (since June 2006, replaced by the Council in that function), the Human Rights Committee is a treaty-based mechanism where a group of experts examines reports and rules on individual communications pertaining only to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It remains disputed whether the Human Rights Committee's "Views under article 5(4) of the Optional Protocol" qualify as decisions of a quasi-judicial body or simply constitute authoritative interpretations on the merits of the cases brought before them.
The members of the Human Rights Committee, who must be "of high moral character and recognized competence in the field of human rights", are elected by the member states but on an individual basis, not as representatives of their countries. They serve four-year terms, with one-half of their number elected every second year at the General Assembly.
Read more about United Nations Human Rights Committee: Individual Complaints (Communications) To The Committee, Members, State Reporting Under The ICCPR
Famous quotes containing the words united, nations, human, rights and/or committee:
“I thought it altogether proper that I should take a brief furlough from official duties at Washington to mingle with you here to-day as a comrade, because every President of the United States must realize that the strength of the Government, its defence in war, the army that is to muster under its banner when our Nation is assailed, is to be found here in the masses of our people.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.”
—Edwin Muir (1887–1959)
“Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above these heights, new peaks will rise.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“My dream is that as the years go by and the world knows more and more of America, it ... will turn to America for those moral inspirations that lie at the basis of all freedom ... that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other’s affairs, who “come out” together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)