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Voting in the United Nations Human Rights Council1

Simon Hug2 and Richard Lukács  
Département de science politique, Université de Genève
 
Paper proposed for presentation at the 4th Conference on
The Political Economy of International Organizations,
Zürich, January, 2011

First version: August 2010, this version: Sep 30, 2010

Abstract

After four years in operation the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is subject to criticism, and various reform proposals are discussed. In the present paper we study systematically the controversial resolutions voted upon in the UNHRC. We find that these controversial resolutions are introduced by countries with a blemished human rights record, and that in the votes on these resolutions the council members belonging to the European Union (EU) vote very distinctly from the remaining members. In addition, the member states of the EU are in these votes almost systematically in the minority. This seems to suggest that in these controversial votes the problems faced by the UNHRC's predecessor, namely the Commission for Human Rights, have reappeared.


Footnotes:

1This paper draws in part on a seminar paper by Richard Lukács (2010). Partial financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant-No 100012-129737) is gratefully acknowledged.

2  Département de science politique, Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; phone ++41 22 379 83 78; email: simon.hug@unige.ch

File translated from TEX by TTH, version 3.12.
On 30 Sep 2010, 21:24.