The United Nations process for evaluating national human rights records is long and a little complex, but nevertheless offers valuable material for journalists to use when exploring human rights violations.
All 193 UN countries must defend their records, about every five years. They face criticism from UN bodies, other governments, and civil society organizations. The process exposes national human rights records, even though no conclusions or recommendations are reached by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).
Government replies may reveal more about their excuses, their policies, and their intentions. …The process offers an opportunity to do some probing fact-checking.
The obscurity of the process — hinted at by its name, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) — presents some challenges, complicated by the UN’s websites.
Nevertheless, here’s a GIJN roadmap, including ideas for stories and some case studies.
Potential Stories
There are several ways to exploit the UPR process for stories.
The UPR process creates a detailed record that can be mined for sources and history. It’s a catalog of every government’s human rights issues, what governments say they will do, and what others say about them.
Raw nerves may be exposed during the process when your government’s human rights records are criticized by other governments and civil society organizations. Emotional comments may surface during open hearings from those affected by human rights violations.
Government replies may reveal more about their excuses, their policies, and their intentions. And very occasionally something new. The process offers an opportunity to do some probing fact-checking.
Also of note, journalists and their representatives have used the UPR process to bring their own concerns to the table, such as about attacks on freedom of the press or lack of government transparency.
Three Key Primary Documents
The UPR process takes a long time, four-and-a-half years. The Fourth Cycle started in 2022 and will end in 2027. The schedule is staggered, with some countries’ reviews already concluded while others are still pending. (You can find a general official description of UPR here.)
Along the way, three reports about each country will be created and two public meetings will be held.
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The three main documents in the UN UPR process. Image: United Nations
During the process, governments respond to others’ concerns. Eventually, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) will issue a summary of the criticisms.
One report is the government’s own self-assessment, the so-called National Report.
Another is an assessment created by the UN based on documents from various UN agencies and bodies. It’s known as the “Compilation of UN Information.” These sometimes tough compilations may reference the findings of other UN committees concerned about human rights, such as the Committee on the Rights of the Child (but check the footnotes for dates to see if the references are recent).
The third report is a summary of written comments from civil society organizations (CSOs) and other stakeholders. Of note, sometimes journalists or media advocacy organizations submit stakeholder reports, which can provide valuable research or context for reporters looking into a country’s human rights conduct. During the 2022 UPR cycle, Amnesty International and other regional media organizations submitted reports to the UN about Indonesia and South Africa.
Three Documents Inform Next Steps in the Process
All three reports are released approximately four to six weeks before a meeting takes place in Geneva of the Working Group on the UPR.
The Working Group is composed of the 47 member states of the Human Rights Council. It holds three sessions a year, discussing each country. The meetings are open for in-person coverage and webcast. (The 58th session of the Human Rights Council was underway as this tipsheet went to print.)
Geneva, Switzerland – April 23, 2015: Palais Wilson building. The headquarters of Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Geneva. Switzerland
The UN’s UPR takes place three times a year at the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (UN OHCHR) in Geneva, Switzerland. Image: Shutterstock
The Working Group adopts an outcome document containing a summary of the statements made at the meeting. The lengthy section, called “Conclusions and/or recommendations,” is not the result of debate among committee members. It’s simply a laundry list of the comments made (sometimes hundreds) and who made them.
The Working Group report is forwarded to the full Human Rights Council, which also considers the reports in open and webcast meetings.
More on these key meetings later, but first, let’s get practical about following this multi-stage process.
Where to Start
First of all, how can you know when the trio of documents about the country you’re investigating will be released and when the Working Group will meet?
Countries are at different points within the current Fourth Cycle. For some countries, the Fourth Cycle review has already been concluded. However, for most countries, the process is still underway.
To learn about the schedule, start with the Fourth Cycle page. Pull up the “Calendar of reviews for the Fourth cycle.”
The statements by other governments reflect a wide variety of concerns and perspectives. Journalists should consider the source and motivation of the commenting country.
The spreadsheet that downloads shows the scheduled times for all reviews. You’ll have to hunt around for your country. Try your computer’s search function. At the top of each column are the dates of upcoming meetings. Note what “session” it is.
The links on the spreadsheet go to country pages. Click on a country name and you’ll land on a page where relevant documents are archived. (These pages can also be found on a list of all countries involved.)
The projected date for a Working Group meeting is significant because the trio of reports (national report/compilation/summary) are posted simultaneously approximately four to six weeks beforehand.
Once you figure out when the Working Group session will be held, you can get more specific timing information on the UPR sessions. Click on the applicable “Timetable.”
But the key thing is that working backward from the projected date of the Working Group meeting, you can anticipate the release of the three reports.
Covering Working Group Meetings
Working Group meetings are the core of the UPR process.
What happens at the meetings? First, officials from the country under review make opening presentations, usually for about 20 minutes, summarizing their work and future goals on human rights issues.
Then, other country representatives and stakeholders make very brief, rapid-fire statements, up to 75 seconds. Many statements are made. During the May 2023 Working Group review on Montenegro, there were 87 speakers during a meeting that lasted almost three hours.
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UN Secretary-General António Guterres addresses the high-level segment of the 58th session of the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, in February 2025. Image: Shutterstock
The delegates often begin with praise and then make diplomatically phrased comments and recommendations.
The remarks can be pointed, too. For example, in the meeting on Montenegro, the US delegate said, “We remained concerned by the slow and sometimes inadequate implementation with institutional anti-corruption safeguards to ensure good governance.”
The statements by other governments reflect a wide variety of concerns and perspectives. Journalists should consider the source and motivation of the commenting country.
The delegates for the governments under review don’t respond to each statement but may make replies during or after the meeting.
Logistics for Following the Working Group
The WG sessions are webcast on UN Web TV. In the “Live Schedule” tab you can find upcoming webcasts and see the languages into which they will be translated.
For past webcasts of UPR sessions, look under “Categories” to find the Human Rights Council and then in “Subcategories” to see past UPR sessions. Also, the UPR country pages link to past webcasts, look for “Related webcast archives.”
Attending meetings, held in Geneva, in person is possible. Get in touch with the press office for accreditation details (hrcmedia@ohchr.org).
There are a number of other pre-meeting documents that may be helpful.
Does the report tell you more than you saw at the meeting? Potentially. One main question is how governments respond to the issues raised.
Press releases are issued several days in advance of Working Group meetings. Besides announcing the times these releases usually indicate what officials will represent the country. (See past releases here.) To be added to the mailing list send an email to hrcmedia@ohchr.org.
The long list of speakers and some statements to be delivered during the review may be posted. Consult the media office for guidance. For even more details on the process, like time allocations, check out the “Modalities and Practices” column on the UPR Extranet page. You can read a detailed UN description of Working Group procedures.
Potentially useful to reporters are the “questions submitted in advance” by other governments, found on the country pages. The questions can be pointed, even if serving geopolitical agendas.
For those knowledgeable about a country’s human rights record, the official answers may be unsurprising.
Working Groups Issue Reports, Not Critiques
The Working Group issues a report and recommendations but does not make explicit judgments.
This is not a consensus or a voting process. Rather, the “Conclusions and/or Recommendations” section of the Working Group report amounts to a lengthy catalog of all the inputs from the delegates.
The final report of the Working Group is released four to six weeks before the Human Rights Council plenary session. (Draft versions may be distributed prior to the Working Group meeting, however, these “advance edited versions” are not always available).
Does the report tell you more than you saw at the meeting? Potentially. One main question is how governments respond to the issues raised. The answer may or may not be part of the Working Group report.
More commonly, the government under review issues its formal responses just before the Human Rights Council meets.
Covering the Human Rights Council
The Human Rights Council sessions can be dramatic, such as when a former political prisoner in Bahrain condemned the country’s treatment of political opponents.
The final stage in the UPR process is for the Council to consider the Working Group reports.
This usually takes place several months after the Working Group meeting. (Past HRC meetings are archived.) For upcoming Council meetings, check with the UN press department.
The UNHRC meetings are shorter than the Working Group meetings, usually only about an hour. But they similarly include statements from the subject government, other governments, and stakeholders.
The Human Rights Council sessions can be dramatic, such as when a former political prisoner in Bahrain condemned the country’s treatment of political opponents. “The country says it wants to support peaceful coexistence but does not want to coexist with any dissenting voices,” he testified.
At the Council meetings, one hour is allotted for discussion of each UPR report. A third of the time goes to the country under review, and the rest to comments by others.
Written statements made at the meetings are publicly available 48 hours after each review. The statements will later be summarized in the Council’s report.
Before the Council meets, the governments under review are asked to submit in writing their positions on the statements made by other members.
In this addendum, governments are asked to make “explicit indication of whether each recommendation enjoys the support of the State (‘supported’) or whether it is noted (‘noted’).” There’s guidance on doing this, but no official standard. “Noted” politely includes flat-out disagreements. These addenda are published on the UPR country webpages under “Outcome of the review.” They usually appear before the HRC meeting.
Country responses are often dense. Evaluating them requires cumbersome cross-referencing to the Working Group reports, and may have limited journalistic value.
Quantification sometimes gives rise to largely meaningless statements comparing the number of recommendations supported versus those noted. (The numbers are found in the “Infographic” section on the county pages.)
In addition, a matrix is produced by the UNHCR that clusters recommendations by theme and indicates which ones are “supported” or “noted.”
The Council does not take positions. The final result is the compendium of recommendations and answers. However, there may be some worthy quotes in one last document, the succinct statements by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
In a two-page “Letter by the High Commissioner” to the Foreign Minister of Bahrain in 2023, for example, the High Commissioner offered a handful of diplomatic entreaties. One was: “Bahrain is encouraged to refrain from further revocations of citizenship, including those made to protect national security, by further repealing and amending relevant legislation, including the Citizenship Act, which provides for the revocation of citizenship when a person is convicted of certain terrorist offences.” That communication from the High Commissioner closed the UPR process for Bahrain for another four-and-a-half years.
A UNESCO guide for journalists about the process says, “It is always important to keep in mind those recommendations that the state has ‘taken note’ of as it is often the very commitments that have not been made that make the news.”
While the UNESCO guide is broadly educational, it lacks some details about the process and how to track it. (Available in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese.)
Case Studies
There have been several journalism stories that have used the UN’s UPR in some capacity.
Stories based on the dialogue can highlight how one country’s government is seen by others. For example, The Shift, an investigative publication in Malta, included UPR statements in an analysis of the country’s failures to implement internal press freedom recommendations: “Several countries have urged Malta to take concrete steps to ensure a safe working environment for journalists, including protecting them from threats, attacks, reprisals, and strategic lawsuits against public participation.”
Much of the more detailed coverage comes from nongovernmental organizations focused on particular countries or specific human rights issues.
The Trump administration’s surprising lack of comment on Iran’s human rights record during that latter’s most recent UPR was reported on by Iran International in early 2025: “It is an unprecedented move that is considered significant by human rights advocates, saying this could show disregard for Iran’s human rights violations.”
North Korea finds many critics, and a few friends, at UN human rights review, was the headline on a November 2024, article in Korea JoongAng Daily that highlighted the country’s repressive human rights tactics and exploitative labor practices.
In an analysis of China’s growing frustration with external criticism of its human rights record, The International Federation for Human Rights noted that: “in a worrying sign of the government’s outright refusal to heed the mounting international concern over key human rights issues, of the 130 recommendations Beijing did not accept, an unprecedented number — 98 — were categorized as ‘rejected’ and 32 were ‘noted.'”
Much of the more detailed coverage comes from nongovernmental organizations focused on particular countries or specific human rights issues. One group, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association maintains a comprehensive index of deadlines facilitating engagement with UN human rights mechanisms, including the UPR.
The International Campaign for Tibet wrote a long article in July 2024 about the Human Rights Council’s latest report on China, with respect to that region: “Despite intense lobbying by Beijing and the deployment of an array of non-governmental organizations controlled by the Chinese government (government-organized non-government organizations, or GONGOs), 21 states addressed the situation in Tibet. This was the largest number since China underwent its first review in 2009.”
The review of Venezuela’s record in November 2024 was covered by Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights, a blog hosted by the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy organization.
NGOs that participate in the process sometimes publicize their interventions. For example, the International Federation of Human Rights and two other NGOs in November of 2024 denounced Egypt’s “near-total failure to comply with international human rights obligations.”
In a joint statement by human rights groups, Yemen was urged in November 2024 to reconsider key recommendations made during the country’s UPR. Two Kenyan groups drew attention to the November 2024 issuance of the joint stakeholder report that “focuses on key issues relating to human rights in the digital context in Kenya, including digital connectivity and inclusion, freedom of expression online and technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), particularly its impact on human and women’s rights defenders.”
Another example: the Malaysian government “has failed to accept recommendations made at the UN’s Human Rights Council to respect and protect civic freedoms, particularly freedom of expression and freedom of assembly,” according to a joint July 2024 statement from CIVICUS, SUARAM, the Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ), FORUM-ASIA, and ARTICLE 19.
Toby McIntosh is a senior advisor for GIJN’s Resource Center, which provides online resources to journalists worldwide. He was the editor of FreedomInfo.org, (2010-2017) a nonprofit website based in Washington, D.C. that covers international transparency laws. He was with Bloomberg BNA for 39 years, has filed numerous US Freedom of Information requests, and has written about FOI policies worldwide. He is a steering committee member of FOIANet, a network of FOI advocates.