How has the UN Human Rights Council Succeeded in Addressing Serious Violations of Human Rights through its Special Sessions?

The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) was founded in 2006 to strengthen the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe. It consists of 47 UN member states, and it deals with thematic and country specific cases through the adoption of resolutions. The HRC meets three times a year in regular sessions in Geneva. It is also possible to organize Special sessions upon request, where the HRC may address urgent and grave violations of human rights. In the end of 2018, the HRC had organized 28 Special sessions mainly dealing with country cases. The country specific work of the HRC is highly political, and that is why less than ten percent of the HRC resolutions have concerned country cases. The majority of the HRC members object to pointing at individual countries, because they perceive this as a threat to state sovereignty. Even if the Special sessions have been criticized of including politicization and selectivity especially because of focusing excessive attention to Israel, after 2014 also several other country cases have been considered. This paper focuses on the HRC Special sessions, and studies how the HRC has succeeded in addressing serious violations of human rights through this mechanism. It concentrates on evaluating the concrete outcomes (voting, resolutions, debates) of these sessions. The paper uses information from the HRC Special session reports and explanations of vote in order to assess state positions. Also, several human rights expert interviews are included to draw clearer and more concise picture of the achievements of the HRC Special sessions. Interestingly, the EU and its member states have been highly active in the HRC country cases by sponsoring 56 per cent of all country resolutions in 2008-14. Also, the US has urged the Council to act on several occasions of gross and systematic human rights violations by state parties. Furthermore, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) can be used to study individual country situations. It could be stated that the country specific focus in the HRC is most often demanded by Western states and objected by the Global South. Hence, the US decision to withdraw from the HRC in summer 2018 will decrease the efforts to focus on country cases. This paper also discusses the future possibilities of the HRC Special sessions to focus on grave violations of human rights and protect people according to its mandate.