A Gathering of Wise Statesmen: The Universal Periodic Review and Canada’s human rights record

Abstract

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is recent innovation of the principal United Nations human rights body, the Human Rights Council. It provides for the regular review of the human rights records of each member state of the United Nations approximately once every four years. In this paper, I argue that the UPR is not an effective mechanism for the promotion and protection of human rights in Canada. Through the lens of the rights of migrant workers as well as refugees and asylum seekers, I show that the UPR has little concrete influence on Canadian policy. I argue that this is due, in part, to flaws in the UPR mechanism itself, which privileges certain approaches to and conceptions of rights over others. Additionally, I argue that UPR’s lack of effect is partly due to Canada’s human rights “implementation gap”: a lack of effective procedures to ensure domestic implementation of its international human rights commitments.