Introducing our new guide to the UPR for human rights defenders

For human rights defenders working to advance human rights online, UN mechanisms can seem intimidating. They’re often complex, unwieldy, distant and dominated by states – and what space exists for non-governmental actors is often carefully limited.

All these things are true of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), the UN’s process for assessing states on their human rights records. As with any non-binding mechanism led by states, the extent to which it contributes to an actual improvement in the human rights situation depends on political will.

But for all its flaws, the UPR is worth engaging with. It’s the only UN process which assesses every state on its human rights obligations using a common set of parameters and procedures – and, as such, offers human rights defenders a useful tool for holding states to account. Its first two cycles, running 2008-2011 and 2012-2016, generated almost 250 recommendations related to human rights online, on issues ranging from internet access, to censorship, surveillance to cybercrime laws. This is in large part due to the efforts of civil society, who have used the UPR to document and highlight violations of human rights online.

To mark the beginning of the UPR’s third cycle, we’ve just published a new guide specifically for human rights defenders working on human rights online.

The guide takes readers through each stage of the UPR process, with resources and case studies of real life advocacy to help inform and structure engagement.

It also provides examples of how the UPR has been used for human rights online, including examples of recommendations that states have accepted relating to the internet, sample civil society reports, advocacy documents, and tips on how to use the UPR to complement ongoing advocacy work.  We hope it will function as a useful introduction to the mechanism and an orientation tool for successful advocacy.