Preferences or blocks?
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
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