The Universal Periodic Review and the UK: State Practice and Constitutional Actors

Every four-and-a-half years, a United Nations (UN) member state will undertake the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The UPR sees the state enter into a dialogue with its peers on its human rights situation – it will receive its share of praise and approval, but also critique and censure, as well as recommendations on how human rights might be improved. This unique, cyclical ritual is the only human rights mechanism to have 100% participation – all UN member states have engaged with the UPR across the three cycles to date, and they continue to do so for the fourth cycle which, at the time of writing, is ongoing. The public audit has facilitated transparency, tracking and documenting the global human rights picture for nearly two decades. It has emboldened civil society, stimulating domestic and transnational coalitions across the world. Yet, despite these feats, the precise value of the UPR remains the subject of debate. Being state led, the UPR is vulnerable to politicisation. States can (and have) used the process as an opportunity to compliment allies and denounce foes (sometimes without regard to human rights at all). Its reliance on states’ cooperation and goodwill means that, whilst all might feel compelled to engage, arguably only those states that take the process seriously seek to benefit. No surprise, then, that research on the UPR has proliferated. Since its inception, it has been the subject of various monographs, edited collections and journal articles, and dedicated scholarly communities have emerged. Academics from across disciplines have sought to interrogate this peculiar mechanism with the view of understanding whether and to what extent it has been a positive step in the promotion and protection of human rights.

The aim of this book is to better understand the actual and potential impact of the UPR in states. It is an inter-disciplinary text which draws on theory from law, political science, and international relations to interrogate various empirical and legal questions. At the outset, it is important to clarify that this book is not so much about the substance of international human rights law (questions about what human rights are or should be). Rather, its focus is on the mechanisms, processes and effects of this law and the institutions designed to oversee its implementation. Simply, this book is about what international human rights law does, with a focus on the UPR. The book emphasises looking at this issue from an external and internal perspective. The former involves observing states (or, more accurately, their governments) at the UPR including their participation with the process, the outcome of the review, and the extent that they implement recommendations. This book’s first contribution is the creation of a framework for assessing a state’s practice at the UPR (Chapters Two). Assessments of states’ UPRs are a feature of the existing literature and help shed light on the extent that the mechanism is achieving its aims of promoting and protecting human rights globally. Yet, this book suggests that how these assessments are carried out, and what standards states are held against, remain inconsistent. It is therefore difficult to reliably observe the success of the UPR. Building on the work of Kathryn Sikkink, the book seeks to provide researchers with the methodology and tools with which to undertake more comprehensive and rigorous assessments of states at the UPR and enable us to paint a more accurate picture of the mechanism’s success. A case study of the UK’s four UPRs to date (2008, 2012, 2017 and 2022) demonstrates how to deploy this new framework in practice (Chapter Three).

On the other hand, the internal perspective relates to the UPR in the state and seeing how the mechanism influences its constituent parts. The second contribution of this book is an enhanced understanding of the factors that affect the UPR’s impact in this way. It suggests that the UPR has the potential to shape a state’s human rights law and practice when its constitutional actors – the executive, legislature and judiciary – engage with the process and its recommendations. Drawing on international relations theory and existing empirical research, it is argued that the UPR is capable of providing these domestic actors (and indeed others) with important opportunities, preferences and leverage to inform and legitimise decision making on human rights issues (Chapter Four). Seeing whether domestic actors in the UK actually deploy the UPR in those ways is an opportunity to query the factors that contribute to or hinder the mechanism’s impact on the state’s law and practice (Chapters Five to Seven). This exercise reveals, inter alia, the importance of domestic actors’ knowledge, understanding and perception of the UPR and its value; the reception of international human rights law via the state’s constitution; actors’ capacity and resources; adequate accountability processes; and adverse perceptions of international human rights mechanisms.