10/02/2009

UPR Info is celebrating its first year of existence!

UPR Info is an initiative of volunteers deeply convinced of the importance and usefulness of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Through this website we have been working to its promotion and strengthening with two goals: raise awareness on the process and make it an effective human rights mechanism.

Besides providing general information and documents, we soon started developing our own analyses: in one year, we produced statements analysis on 13 States; we showed how certain issues have been treated in the process; we have identified for each States under Review the accepted and rejected recommendations and sorted all the recommendations by the States that made them.

A first year also brings credibility and visibility building. We have been invited to conferences and made several presentations of our work to NGOs.

Our second year will be dedicated to strengthening our organisation and expanding our activities, thank notably to our first support received by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom. Looking at the follow-up phase of the UPR, we will display information on each State about the implementation on the ground. Due to the concern of reaching grassroots organisations, we will translate the website into spanish. To keep updated to the UPR process and our activities, we have linked our news to our RSS. Finally, in order to improve the website and provide the information and analyses you need, we will upload in the next days a satisfaction survey.

We would like to thank you for using this website and the encouraging words we received through out this first year. We hope UPR Info's activities will grow as much as the interest in the UPR.

Sincerely,

Roland Chauville
President of UPR Info