Valentina Carraro has published a new article in the Journal of Human rights, partly building on the results of our research project.
Here are the bibliographic details: Carraro, V. (2025). Overlapping institutions in the UN human rights system: Mutually strengthening or undermining? Journal of Human Rights. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2025.2456827
And here is the abstract:
The UN system is characterized by the presence of multiple institutions that monitor states’ human rights performance. Two UN mechanisms in particular, the 10 treaty bodies and the Universal Periodic Review, have partially overlapping procedures and competences when it comes to examining states’ periodic reports and issuing recommendations for improvement. Research has shown that these bodies often provide states with duplicating—and at times contradicting—recommendations, yet it is unclear to what consequences this leads. To what extent, and under what conditions, do these duplications and contradictions place the institutions in a mutually strengthening or undermining relationship? This article devises an analytical framework to address this question, and it considers that institutions will mutually strengthen one another if their overlapping activities give rise to low levels of strategic behavior by states and high levels of institutional credibility, and vice-versa. Data were collected by means of 22 semistructured interviews conducted with actors directly involved in the mechanisms. Findings reveal that contradictions lead to mutual undermining in all cases, whereas the consequences of repetitions are more nuanced and depend on several factors related both to the institutions and to the positionality of the states involved.