On Monday, the Human Rights Council (HRC) will start its 12th session. Between 23 and 25 September, it will adopt the UPR Working Group reports from the 5th session (4-15 May 2009), namely of: Central African Republic, Monaco, Belize, Chad, Congo, Malta, New Zealand, Afghanistan, Chile, Viet Nam, Uruguay, Yemen, Vanuatu, Macedonia, Comoros and Slovakia.
Those States under Review (SuR) have until then to present their responses to recommendations made during the interactive dialogue. As of today, only New Zealand, Malta and Viet Nam have provided an addendum to their report. Uruguay has already accepted all the recommendations and the Comoros provided responses to all its recommendations in the report of the Working Group.
To facilitate State delegations and NGO work, we have produced, for each SuR, a document containing a list of all recommendations made, including the rejected ones, and the preliminary responses given by the SuR in the Report of the Working Group (and the addendum for Malta, New Zealand and Viet Nam) as well as a two-page document summarizing all SuR responses.
On September 25, the HRC will hold a general debate on the UPR. This debate is likely to be very animated. The Secretariat has just circulated a non-paper containing proposals to improve modalities of the registration to the list of speakers at the UPR Working Group and HRC sessions under item 6. This proposal will be the hot topic of the 12th session and especially during that general debate.
On September 14, the HRC will also select the troika members for UPR sessions 6, 7 and 8 and the order of review of UPR sessions 7, 8 and 9.
On the ongoing issue of translation of UPR reports, the Bureau of the HRC decided to set up a task force to find solutions.
Finally, the dates for UPR sessions 7, 8 and 9 held in 2010 are now known and are respectively 8 to 19 February, 10 to 21 May and 22 November to 3 December.
On UPR-info.org, we have harmonized our documents “Responses to recommendations”. These individual documents per SuR listing all the recommendations received, even the rejected ones, now classify them in four categories: accepted, rejected, no clear response and pending. At the beginning of the document, a table explains when and how the SuR has responded to the recommendations and summarizes the number of recommendations (or cluster) in each of the four categories.
We have also created a new document, which summarizes NGO participation at the UPR. It shows, in one page and in the form of an arrow timeline, the numerous actions NGOs can take during the different stages of the process.