What is the Difference Between the Commission on Human Rights, the Human Rights Council, and the Human Rights Committee?

These three UN bodies all have similar titles but distinct functions:

The Human Rights Committee was established to monitor compliance of the ICCPR in states that are party to the agreement (have ratified and adopted the ICCPR in their domestic law). It consists of 18 “independent experts who are persons of high moral character and recognized competence in the field of human rights.” Participating governments are required to file reports every five years that detail the state of civil and political rights in their countries, and the Committee meets three times a year to review these reports and issue recommendations based on their findings to the UN General Assembly.³

The Commission on Human Rights was established by the UN Charter in 1946 with the idea that it would consist of representatives from various UN member states. Over the next fifty years, it was instrumental in bringing attention to human rights violations around the world. Over time, however, membership of the Commission came to be viewed as a “mere commodity,” something to be negotiated over within regional blocks—each of which had a fixed number of representatives—in exchange for influence.

According to Mexico’s ambassador to the UN, Enrique Berruga, “A spot on the whaling commission would be traded for one on human rights as if countries were swapping ‘a bag of peanuts for a Rolls Royce.’”⁴ In the 1990s and 2000s, notorious human rights violators, such as Cuba, China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Libya, had secured spots on the Commission, and used their positions to block UN action against their own abusive practices.⁵

In 2006, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan spearheaded an effort to replace the Commission with a new Human Rights Council, which would have stricter scrutiny over which countries attained membership. Unfortunately, the first year of the Council was not promising, leading the Washington Post editorial page to call it “far worse than its predecessor” and “a travesty.”

Human rights advocates have pushed for action on pressing human rights violations in Darfur and Sudan, among other places. But the Council—which still includes offenders such as China, Cuba, Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia—has refused to act, instead focusing on Israeli abuses. Some blame the disproportionate influence of the Organization of the Islamic Conference for this failure.⁶

For its part, the did not immediately seek membership on the new Council in 2006, arguing that membership criteria are still not sufficient to enable it to be effective. This was remarkable because it was the first time the U.S. had chosen not to participate in the UN’s main human rights body since its inception in 1946 (the U.S. was voted off for a year in 2001). However, U.S President Barack Obama reversed course, and in 2009 joined the 47 member council.  Upon joining, U.S. diplomats “pledged to work constructively with other council members on behalf of the word’s persecuted and abused people.”⁷