The United Nations Human Rights Council: A Promise to be Fulfilled

The creation of the Human Rights Council (Council) on 15 March 2006 is the most recent milestone in the history of UN intergovernmental discussion of human rights that dates back to 1946, when the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) created the Commission on Human Rights (Commission).1 For many years the Commission served the United Nations and the international community well. Of course it had its shortcomings and was criticised accordingly,2 but no one can doubt that over its 60 years it made a very important contribution to human rights standard setting, to the development of the UN institutional capacity to promote and protect human rights and, in many national situations, to significant improvements in the protection of human rights. In the early years of this decade, the Commission became the target of increasingly severe criticism.3 Not all of the criticism was new, but with the publication of ‘A more secure world: Our shared responsibility’,4 the report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, and Kofi Annan's response in ‘In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all’,5 the criticism began to take on visibility and bite in a way that it never had before.