About the seminar
The United Nations Human Rights Council and its mechanism of Universal Periodic Review are known to be highly politicized and biased. At the same time, the Human Rights Council mandates and appoints independent experts to report and advise on human rights and to inform Council decisions: The Special Procedures. Praised by Kofi Annan as the “the crown jewel” of the human rights system, these are composed of individual experts and groups of five experts, who serve in their personal capacity.
The Special Procedures are a central source of transparency about countries’ human rights practices and provide independent information to the Human Rights Council. A unique feature of their mandate is the competence to conduct a country visit to assess the human rights situation at the domestic level. They choose and ask countries to conduct a fact-finding mission and can only do so if these countries formally accept their visit request. Accepting the visit request can be costly for the reputation states, as country visits’ findings are published and can be used for naming and shaming.
In this seminar, organized by the Research Group on Global Challenges to Human Rights Law, Policy and Practice, professor and guest researcher Andrea Liese will present ongoing research into the access and independence of the Special Procedures, with basis in two research questions: First: Why do member states voluntarily agree to Special Procedure scrutiny? And second: Are the Special Procedures independent, i.e., impartial to the interests of certain member states or rather compromised in their independence? These questions are analysed with novel data on visit requests, visits, and subsequent reports by all holders of an individual thematic mandate between 1995 and 2020.
About the speaker
Andrea Liese is Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Potsdam in Germany, where she also serves as Vice Dean for Research and Academic Qualification Phase. She is also a member of the research group "The International Rule of Law - Rise or Decline?" funded by the German Research Council from 2016 to 2024, which examines the role of international law in a changing global order. She has published extensively on the role of international organizations and their bureaucracies, non-state actors, institutions, and norms in international relations and in international human rights regimes.
Andrea is currently a guest researcher at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (NCHR).
Practical information
The seminar will be moderated by Nina Reiners, Associate Professor at the NCHR.
The seminar will be held at the 7th floor in Domus Juridica. If you do not have an access card, please call +47 403 91 077 when outside.
We kindly ask that participants register in advance: