Revisão periódica universal: percepções e vozes da sociedade civil

Abstract

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR), one of the United Nations Human Rights Council (Council) mechanisms, aims to monitor the human rights situation globally through recommendations addressed to States. The creation of the UPR, brought about in the wake of the reform of the extinct United Nations Commission on Human Rights (Commission), brought institutional innovations in an attempt to overcome the problems of selectivity and inefficiency, indicated as the main critical points of operation of the organism in monitoring the international human rights. Besides the particularities of monitoring human rights through the UPR, this mechanism introduces two virtually unprecedented elements for the universal system of human rights: a tendency to circumscribe international human rights dynamics confined to States and the experimentation with decisions of a purely recommendatory nature. The literature that traces the historical origins of international human rights regimes points out that human rights systems were created to hold States accountable for human rights violations and abuses through international norms and institutions created specifically for that purpose. Alongside these internationally authorized control systems, civil society organizations independently exercise scrutiny of both state behavior and the functioning of international organizations. This means that, in practice, human rights systems, although arising from a purely intergovernmental decision, bring together the participation of civil society organizations in a more or less institutionalized manner, with different capacities for action. Based on the assumption that social organizations play crucial roles in international human rights systems, this dissertation seeks to understand how these limitations apply to the international mechanism of the Universal Periodic Review in order to identify the ways in which civil society organizations have organized themselves to circumvent the restrictions imposed on social participation in these dynamics, which is carried out through semi-structured interviews conducted with a sample of ten civil society organizations operating in the UPR of Brazil.