Negotiating the UN Human Rights Council

Abstract

This chapter examines the negotiation of the UN Human Rights Council in order to systematically analyse and compare the preferences that rising powers, established powers, and NGOs have expressed with regard to its institutional design. The UN Human Rights Council is the key institution in the human rights regime and one of the few recent cases of institutional reform. The negotiation surrounding its creation offers unique insight into the conflict lines that run between ‘old’ powers, ‘new’ powers, and NGOs in the field of human rights. In this chapter, new data have been collected and analysed consisting of more than 500 written statements in which states and NGOs express their demands about the policy content and the authority structure of the new human rights institution.