Civil Society and Non-Governmental Organizations

In one line

Civil society organisations supply the facts, the claimants, the drafting, the pressure and the memory that the framework needs and that States have no incentive to provide, and their legitimacy, funding and accountability are contested for reasons that are partly genuine and partly self-serving.

Their place in the system

Charter article 71 empowers the Economic and Social Council to make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organisations concerned with matters within its competence, which is the basis of consultative status.

They were in the room in 1945 and in 1948. Organisations present at San Francisco pressed successfully for the human rights language in the Charter, which is a fact worth knowing because it establishes that the framework's advocacy component is original and not a later addition.

Consultative status today allows attendance, written and oral statements and participation in United Nations bodies including the Human Rights Council, and it is granted by a committee of States, which is where the political control operates.

The five functions

One: fact-finding

The framework runs on facts nobody official collects. A treaty body examines a State report; the report is written by the State. What allows the body to test it is the parallel or shadow report submitted by organisations, and the same is true of the Universal Periodic Review.

In litigation the same function appears as documentation, and in India as the material behind public interest proceedings.

Two: standard-setting

Drafting and pressing for new instruments. The Convention against Torture, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Disabilities Convention with its unprecedented participation of persons with disabilities, and the treaty on enforced disappearance all had substantial non-governmental authorship.

And the Paris Principles for national institutions came out of the same process, as [The Paris Principles] sets out.

Three: bringing and supporting claims

Individual communications, regional court cases and domestic litigation are frequently identified, prepared, funded and argued by organisations rather than by the affected person acting alone.

In India the relaxation of standing in public interest litigation made this the dominant mode: a person acting bona fide in the interest of those unable to approach the court may move it, which converted the writ jurisdiction into a route usable by the poorest.

Four: pressure

The boomerang, named in [Globalization and Human Rights: the Argument Both Ways]: a domestic movement that cannot move its own government reaches allies abroad who press it from outside.

Naming and shaming, whose effects and limits are the subject of [Naming, Shaming and the Politics of Enforcement].

Five: memory and education

Archives, casualty documentation and truth-commission material are often held by organisations because States have an interest in their disappearance, and [Human Rights Education] is largely delivered by them.