4.2 — Institutions and enforcement

4.2 — Institutions and enforcement

  • Know the main international institutions that deal with human rights.

  • Understand the gap between rights as declared and rights as enforced.

  • Be able to explain why international human-rights enforcement is weaker than domestic legal enforcement. The United Nations and its bodies. The UN is the primary international forum for human-rights work. Several UN bodies deal with rights specifically:

  • The Human Rights Council. A body of 47 member states elected by the General Assembly. It conducts the Universal Periodic Review, in which every country's human-rights record is reviewed every few years. The Council has been criticized — often, in any given year, for the specific states sitting on it — but i