Part IV The Governance of Human Rights, 20 Human Rights Co-Ordination Within the UN System

Subject(s):

Human rights

This concluding chapter looks at human rights co-ordination within the UN system. For a long time, human rights in the United Nations tended to be treated as a special domain, one which might be of growing importance, but which did not necessarily need to be a consistent focus of the entire UN machinery. The importance of co-ordination and coherence for human rights promotion, however, has steadily become clearer, as the perception has grown that the human rights ‘issue area’ cannot be successfully dealt with in a vacuum or in isolation. The focus here, accordingly, is on the relationship of human rights to various relevant parts of the UN system—‘inter-regime’ co-ordination—rather than on co-ordination among human rights activities undertaken by the various members of the UN family of institutions—‘intra-regime’ co-ordination. It is the former aspect of co-ordination that has proved to be most problematic and had achieved the least progress until the recent period.