Universal Periodic Review
Based on Wikipedia: Universal Periodic Review
The World's Most Awkward Report Card
Imagine sitting in a room while 193 countries take turns telling you everything you're doing wrong. Your prisons are overcrowded. Your journalists keep disappearing. Your minorities face discrimination. And you have to sit there, listen politely, and then explain what you plan to do about it.
This is the Universal Periodic Review, and every nation on Earth must go through it.
The Universal Periodic Review—usually shortened to the U.P.R.—is perhaps the most ambitious accountability experiment in the history of international relations. Created in 2006 as part of a broader reform of the United Nations, it does something no human rights mechanism had ever attempted before: it examines every single country's human rights record, without exception. The United States gets reviewed. China gets reviewed. Norway gets reviewed. North Korea gets reviewed. Nobody escapes the spotlight.
How It Came To Be
The U.P.R. emerged from the ashes of a discredited predecessor. For decades, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights had been the world's main forum for addressing abuses. But it suffered from a fatal flaw: selectivity. Powerful countries could shield themselves and their allies from scrutiny while turning the proceedings into a cudgel against enemies. By the early 2000s, the Commission had become a sad joke—Libya and Sudan were electing themselves to membership while deflecting criticism of their own atrocities.
In 2005, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan pushed for sweeping reforms. The Commission was abolished entirely and replaced with a new body: the Human Rights Council. And crucially, this new council came with a built-in accountability mechanism that would treat all countries equally.
On April 3rd, 2006, the General Assembly passed Resolution 60/251, bringing the Universal Periodic Review into existence.
The Ground Rules
The architects of the U.P.R. understood something important: if you want countries to actually participate in a review of their human rights record, you can't make the process feel like an inquisition. Countries that feel attacked simply refuse to cooperate. So they designed the mechanism around a set of principles meant to encourage genuine engagement rather than defensive posturing.
The process must be cooperative, not confrontational. It must be objective, not politically motivated. It should avoid duplicating other human rights mechanisms while adding genuine value. And critically, it must ensure equal treatment—the United States cannot receive gentler treatment than Cuba simply because it has more powerful friends.
There's also a practical dimension. The review cannot be so burdensome that it overwhelms either the country being examined or the Council itself. When you're trying to evaluate 193 nations regularly, efficiency matters.
The Three Documents
Every country review rests on three pillars of information, each coming from a different source.
First, the country under review prepares its own national report—a twenty-page document describing its human rights framework, the challenges it faces, and what it's doing to address them. Think of this as the country's opening statement, its chance to frame the narrative before others weigh in.
Second, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights compiles a ten-page summary of everything the U.N. system already knows about the country. This includes reports from special investigators who focus on specific issues like torture or freedom of expression, as well as assessments from treaty monitoring bodies. If a country has been ignoring its obligations under the Convention Against Torture, that information shows up here.
Third, the High Commissioner's office prepares another ten-page summary—this time drawing from outside sources. Non-governmental organizations submit their assessments. National human rights institutions, where they exist, provide their perspectives. Civil society gets a voice.
Together, these three documents ensure that the reviewing countries have access to the government's self-assessment, the U.N.'s institutional knowledge, and the observations of independent watchdogs. The truth usually lies somewhere in the triangulation.
The Review Itself
The actual review happens during sessions of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review, which is composed of the Human Rights Council's forty-seven member states and chaired by the Council's president. Forty-two countries are reviewed each year, spread across three sessions, with fourteen countries examined per session.
Each country gets three and a half hours in the spotlight.
The first seventy minutes belong to the country under review. This is its opportunity to walk through its human rights landscape: the constitutional protections it has in place, the institutions it has built, the progress it has made, and the challenges it still faces. Countries can also announce voluntary commitments—pledges to take specific actions to improve their human rights situation.
Then comes the interactive dialogue, which lasts one hundred and forty minutes. Any U.N. member state—not just the forty-seven on the Human Rights Council, but any of the full one hundred and ninety-three—can take the floor, ask questions, and make recommendations. This is where the review gets interesting.
The questions can be pointed. Why are opposition leaders in prison? What happened to the journalists who went missing last year? Why haven't you ratified the convention on migrant workers? Countries must respond, at least partially, in front of their peers.
The Troika System
Each review is facilitated by a group of three countries known as the "troika," which serves as rapporteurs for the process. The troika has two main responsibilities.
Before the review, they receive and transmit advance questions from other U.N. member states to the country under review. This gives the reviewed country time to prepare thoughtful responses rather than being ambushed.
After the review, the troika drafts the outcome document—a summary of what happened during the proceedings, including all the recommendations made by other states and any voluntary commitments announced by the reviewed country. This document is prepared with help from the U.P.R. secretariat and requires the involvement of both the reviewed state and the states that made recommendations.
The troika system ensures that no single country controls the narrative of any review.
What Happens To The Recommendations
Here's where the rubber meets the road. During the first cycle of the U.P.R., which ran from 2008 to 2012, countries received a staggering 21,356 recommendations and made 599 voluntary pledges. That's not a typo—over twenty-one thousand recommendations across all countries reviewed.
But a recommendation is worthless if it sits in a filing cabinet.
After the Working Group session, the outcome document moves to the full Human Rights Council for discussion and formal adoption. An hour is allocated for each country's document. During this time, the reviewed state can address questions that weren't fully answered during the original dialogue. Other countries can express their views. And for the first time, civil society gets a voice—non-governmental organizations with the proper accreditation can make general comments before the outcome report is adopted.
The reviewed country must also indicate which recommendations it accepts and which it does not. This is crucial. Accepted recommendations become commitments that the country is expected to implement. Rejected recommendations go on record too, creating a documented disagreement that human rights advocates can reference for years to come.
Countries are encouraged—though not required—to provide midterm updates on how they're implementing their accepted recommendations. As of early 2013, only twenty-eight countries had bothered to submit such reports. The gap between recommendation and implementation remains the mechanism's most persistent weakness.
When Countries Don't Play Along
The U.P.R. is designed as a cooperative mechanism, which raises an obvious question: what happens when a country simply refuses to cooperate?
The answer, so far, is unsatisfying.
The most notable case of non-cooperation involved Israel, which was scheduled for review on January 29th, 2013, but didn't show up. The Human Rights Council discussed the issue of "persistent non-cooperation" at subsequent sessions in March and June of that year, essentially debating what consequences, if any, should follow.
Eventually, Israel resumed cooperation and was reviewed in October 2013. But the Council never actually defined what "persistent non-cooperation" means or what penalties it triggers. The opportunity to establish a precedent was missed. This remains a gap in the system—there's no clear enforcement mechanism for countries that simply refuse to participate.
The Role Of Civil Society
While the U.P.R. is fundamentally an intergovernmental process—states reviewing states—civil society organizations have carved out meaningful roles.
They can participate in national consultations when governments prepare their reports, at least in countries that take the process seriously. They can submit information that gets incorporated into the stakeholder summary prepared by the High Commissioner's office. They can attend Working Group sessions and watch the reviews unfold, even though they cannot participate in the interactive dialogue. They can attend Council sessions and make general comments before outcome documents are adopted. And perhaps most importantly, they can track whether countries actually implement their accepted recommendations.
Several organizations have taken on this tracking role with impressive rigor. UPR Info, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization, has conducted extensive assessments of implementation rates. Their research has documented both successes and failures, creating accountability that might not otherwise exist.
How It Differs From Other Mechanisms
The U.P.R. is not the only way the international community monitors human rights. Far from it. But it fills a unique niche.
Treaty bodies monitor compliance with specific agreements. If a country has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a committee of experts periodically reviews how well that country is living up to its obligations. But these bodies only examine countries that have signed the relevant treaties, and they focus only on the rights covered by those treaties.
Special procedures—a network of independent experts and investigators—examine specific themes like torture, freedom of expression, or arbitrary detention. They can investigate situations in any country but only within their defined mandates.
The U.P.R. is different because it's universal in scope. Every country. Every human rights issue. No exceptions. A country might have avoided ratifying certain treaties or blocked visits from certain investigators, but it cannot escape periodic review.
The mechanism is also distinctly peer-driven. It's not independent experts delivering judgments; it's other governments asking questions and making recommendations. This has both advantages and disadvantages. Governments may pull their punches when reviewing allies. But recommendations coming from other states may also carry more political weight than those from U.N. experts.
Evolution Over Time
The U.P.R. has not remained static since its creation. After the first five-year cycle concluded in 2012, the Human Rights Council conducted a formal review of how the mechanism was working.
Several adjustments emerged. The review cycle was extended—first to four and a half years for the second cycle, then to five years for the third. This gives countries more time to implement recommendations before facing their next review. It also reduces the burden on the Council and the countries being reviewed.
The focus also shifted. First-cycle reviews emphasized establishing baseline information about each country's human rights framework. Second and subsequent cycles focus more on implementation—what has the country actually done since its last review? This shift from description to accountability represents meaningful evolution.
A voluntary fund was established to provide financial and technical assistance to countries that want help implementing recommendations but lack the capacity to do so on their own. Not every human rights failure stems from malice; some stem from poverty, institutional weakness, or lack of expertise. The fund tries to address that.
What It Accomplishes—And What It Doesn't
Assessing the U.P.R.'s effectiveness is genuinely difficult. On one hand, it has created an unprecedented amount of documented information about human rights practices worldwide. Every country now has a public record of the recommendations it has received, the commitments it has made, and the progress—or lack thereof—it has achieved. This transparency has value.
On the other hand, peer review has inherent limitations. Countries often make bland, easily-achievable recommendations to their allies while reserving sharp criticism for adversaries. Authoritarian governments can accept recommendations with no intention of implementing them. And there's no enforcement mechanism—a country that ignores its commitments faces embarrassment, not sanctions.
The best way to think about the U.P.R. may be as one tool in a larger toolkit. It doesn't replace treaty bodies, special procedures, or the pressure that comes from investigative journalism and civil society advocacy. But it adds another layer of accountability, another opportunity for uncomfortable conversations, another set of documented commitments that activists can invoke.
In a world where human rights violations often occur in darkness, any mechanism that shines a light—even an imperfect, politically-constrained light—has value.
The Arms Sales Connection
The U.P.R. becomes particularly relevant when countries consider their relationships with partners whose human rights records are troubling. Canada, for instance, has faced persistent questions about its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, even as Saudi Arabia's U.P.R. outcomes have documented serious concerns about its treatment of dissidents, women's rights, and the conduct of its military operations.
The documented recommendations from U.P.R. reviews can inform these debates. When activists argue that a country should restrict arms sales to a particular partner, they can point to specific, internationally-recognized recommendations that the partner has received and ignored. The U.P.R. creates a paper trail that shapes subsequent policy discussions.
In this way, the mechanism's influence extends beyond the Geneva conference rooms where reviews take place. The information it generates becomes ammunition—sometimes literally relevant to debates about actual ammunition—in political battles fought in capitals around the world.