Increasing Participation: Meeting With UN Committee Members


Overview


On 9 June 2022 a group of people living in the UK with direct experience of economic, social and cultural rights violations (and a couple of organisations working with them)[1] met online with Michael Windfuhr and Peters Emuze, members of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR).

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss:

Meeting Contents


We spoke to the Committee members about our belief in the value of participation with the Committee, and our desire to help improve it in relation to human rights at the grassroots. We noted that the human rights reviews systems at the UN were not designed to include people with direct experience. Some issues we raised included:

1. People without legal status, such as people seeking asylum, cannot attend events in Geneva in person. The irony is that these groups of people often are at the sharpest end of experiencing violations of their economic, social, and cultural rights;

2. The language and acronyms used by the Committee, and the whole UN human rights system are really removed from the grassroots and can be quite exclusionary;

3. Issues with the process itself, for example there are no clear timelines available online to allow groups to plan, seems like participants need expert knowledge/the right connections to know the timelines and that excludes people and groups not ‘in the know’;

4. The same goes for the protocols for engagement and the culture of the UN human rights monitoring system– it can be really difficult to understand unless someone tells you, which leads to the same groups participating each cycle and acts as a chill factor to groups who are new to the process;

5. The actual process of giving evidence to the Committee – both at the pre-sessional working group and during the informal lunchtime briefing – are very formal and quite daunting;

We emphasised that we understood the Committee suffered extreme challenges in terms of resources, but thought that there were some potential ideas they could consider:

Outcome


The meeting felt really positive and progressive, with the two Committee members actively listening to us and asking considered questions.

They have agreed to bring some of our suggestions to the wider CESCR when they meet in Autumn 2022 and have told us that they will feed back to us. So, watch this space!

Participants


[1] Full list of people who participated in this process: