The UN’s Human Rights Elites: Who Are the Special Rapporteurs?

In a recent speech at Princeton University, Volker Türk, the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, described the current predicament as “a challenging time for human rights around the world.” Wars, territorial conquest, attacks on aid workers, torture, austerity politics, the decline of civil liberties, and direct attacks on human rights’ actors are all-too-familiar symptoms of an international human rights regime in “crisis.” While international law and multilateral institutions are both framed as facing an existential crisis, a set of human rights actors is standing up for them by means of speaking to their universality. A particularly important group of actors in this effort are UN Special Rapporteurs: while they are often in the news, their mandate is usually poorly understood.

In essence, they are independent human rights experts, who have been appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and are tasked with monitoring and developing international norms, specifically in the context of a particular theme (e.g. torture, or freedom of expression) or country. Francesca Albanese (Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Palestinian Territory Occupied Since 1967), recently reappointed for a further period of three years, is a particularly prominent contemporary example, as she regularly uses media appearances and university lectures strategically to enhance the visibility of her mandate. The first individual Special Rapporteur – on the situation of human rights in Pinochet’s Chile – was established in 1979, growing out of a system of fact-finding missions on Apartheid South Africa, the occupied Palestinian territory, and Chile since the late 1960s.

My research, which is part of a larger book project on human rights elites in world politics, shows that both historically and today the overarching UN human rights architecture remains an important symbolic space, one that continues to attract a multiplicity of actors who seek to speak on behalf of the universal by mobilising its multiple institutional resources. Universalism is commonly understood as a principle of international law and the UN as an international organisation, a public good which applies to all, or, at the very least, a claim that transcends state boundaries.

By asking, instead, whose voices carry the power to speak for the universal, my research seeks to shift this common legal-institutional focus toward the power of spokespersons to embody human rights claims, which they seek to universalise across local, state, and institutional boundaries. Of course, similar types of humanitarian and human rights spokespersons exist: think of ICRC delegates who negotiate access to prisons, or other human rights defenders who operate elsewhere. And this begs a key question: who are these Special Rapporteurs? What makes them so “special” as human rights advocates, as suggested by their title?

Special Rapporteurs Revisited

In a nutshell, Special Rapporteurs are independent and unpaid human rights experts. They are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council on a three-year term basis, with the possibility of extension for another three years. Among other tasks, they undertake country visits, act on individual cases of human rights violations, help develop international human rights standards, provide technical advice and engage more generally in advocacy and public awareness campaigns. For example, David Boyd, then Special Rapporteur on the human right to a healthy environment, was central in mobilising support in the General Assembly which adopted a resolution in July 2022 declaring access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment a universal human right.

Special Rapporteurs enjoy similar privileges and diplomatic immunities as full-time UN staff. In theory, this should enable them to perform their functions without fear of coercion by states or other actors hostile to the work of special rapporteurs, guaranteeing their role as independent UN experts. In practice, however, the situation is more intricate. To give just one example, in early 2018, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a member of the Indigenous Kankanaey Igorot people and then UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, was accused of membership in a terrorist organisation by the Philippine government, then still led by president Duterte who is now in ICC custody in The Hague.

Fearing for her safety, Tauli-Corpuz immediately left the country. The accusation of being a member of a terrorist organization occurred in the wake of certain critical public comments she had made regarding the militarisation, attacks, and killings of Mindanao Indigenous peoples in the Philippines, following Duterte’s imposition of martial law in May 2017. This case showed the high stakes for Special Rapporteurs who dare to speak out about human rights violations, raising questions over the level of protection they can mobilise from within and outside the UN human rights system.    

Still, acting mostly as independent experts rather than as UN officials, they are not fully institutionalised within the UN’s bureaucratic structure. As I explored in a recent article, this shows how a broader and multi-professional transnational social space of international human rights work is loosely connected with the UN’s more formal, institutionalized human rights architecture. Given such transnational dynamics, studying the professional and biographical trajectories of UN Special Rapporteurs offers an interesting prism through which one can analyse the field of international human rights, whether from the perspective of law-making, advocacy or norm-development.

Philip Alston, a leading international human rights lawyer who has acted twice as a Special Rapporteur, formulated the persistence of this system of Special Rapporteurs as a major puzzle: “what is actually surprising to me is that the system has not yet been subverted,” he said in an interview I did with him in 2020. During this conversation, he reflected on his career as a former Special Rapporteur on first extrajudicial killings and then extreme poverty. His observation regarding the resilience of the Special Rapporteurs points to two important dynamics. First, there is a system in place, rather than individually appointed experts who pursue their mandates autonomously. Second, this system is under more or less constant attack, yet somehow it managed to securely ground itself. Thematic mandates continue to proliferate, at times seemingly diluting existing norms, as some have claimed, by creating overlapping mandates or mandates that advance competing understandings of human rights norms.

If we want to understand the surprisingly resilient foundations of this Special Rapporteur system, we may need to return to its very origins, as I suggest in my current book project on the UN’s human rights elites. In this project, I trace this system’s foundations back to a series of ad hoc working groups and human rights fact finding missions established in the 1960s to investigate human rights violations in the context of internationally scrutinizing structural violators of international law, specifically South Africa’s Apartheid, Israel’s occupation of the territory of Palestine since 1967, and Chile’s enforced disappearances in the 1970s. Often, the same experts would serve on those various UN fact-finding missions for several decades. Most crucially, in 1979, the very first UN individual Special Rapporteur on Chile was created, in part to save money as working groups with several members were increasingly seen as being too costly. These early prototypes provided the institutional foundations for the Special Procedures Mandates system today: the ability of Special Rapporteurs to decide on their own methods of work, their rootedness in several professional worlds at the same time, such as in civil society or academia, and their ambiguous relationship with the UN bureaucracy, which gives them room for manoeuvre to exploit and combine UN resources with other professional resources. 

Biographical Trajectories

As part of my research, I collected comprehensive data on all 122 thematic Special Rapporteurs (appointed between 1979 and the June 2020) on their educational background, nationalities, diversity profiles, professional trajectories and cultural capitals, such as prizes and membership in prestigious committees. In prosopographical analyses, data can be analysed through a variety of methods, from quantitative techniques like multiple correspondence analysis and visual network analysis (VNA) to more qualitative tools, in combination with biographical interviews. In order to visualise the social space of transnational human rights elites, I combined VNA, aggregate prosopographical data and thirty biographical interviews so far which offer more subjective insights into special rapporteurs’ mode of travelling through a variety of social and professional spaces.

My aim with these interviews is to generate insights on the heterogenous body of Special Rapporteurs, pointing to commonalities and differences in profiles, strategies and understanding of their independent status. Subsequently, I have been conducting interviews with former and current Special Rapporteurs from various geographical areas, different professional backgrounds and mandates. For example, as I explore in my recent article, an interesting commonality shared by a number of special rapporteurs I interviewed is the context of their university education, usually law, and often converging with a period in which their native countries were emerging from authoritarian rule into democracy, which enabled them to put the academic study of human rights into practice through legal institutions, new law firms, or democratic movements. A difference can be seen in their approach to the expectation of Special Rapporteurs as “independent” experts. Some interpret this as an individual trait or “doing it their own way,” while others act in a more collective fashion, by building alliances and employing joint strategies to advance human rights norms and compliance.

In the interviews, myself and the interviewee co-produce knowledge and meanings of social worlds. Take the example of the conversation with Philip Alston quoted earlier. His surprise at the durability of the system is analytically useful, as it recasts international human rights into a space of struggle that involves various actors, interests, strategies and understandings. At the same time, it also raises certain important methodological questions, such as how intertwined biographies of human rights actors in the UN can help us theorise the transnational interconnectedness of institutional and professional worlds.

Crisis and Resilience

The system of Special Rapporteurs has significantly grown in size over the years since its establishment in 1979. Initially, their mandates focused broadly on civil and political rights such as the right to life, torture, and freedom of expression, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. From the mid-1990s onward, mandates with a focus on economic, social, and cultural rights were established, covering issues such as foreign debt, structural adjustment, and extreme poverty. In the early 2000s, mandates focusing on collective rights were added, such as a Special Rapporteur on Indigenous rights and one dedicated to the question of minorities. More recently, new mandates focus on a wide range of issues, such as on disabilities, or the discrimination of individuals on the basis of gender and sexuality.

Despite institutional issues affecting their work, such as major budgetary constraints, time delays in approving procedures, lack of administrative support, lack of a team of field monitors and limited resources for follow-up visits to states, to name a few, the system endures. This durability, I argue, is to be found beyond institutional dynamics at the UN: it is rooted in Special Rapporteurs’ identity as “plural professionals.” They practice several professions at the same time, allowing them to mobilise resources, expertise, and powerful networks with actors from civil society, supportive diplomats, or academics beyond the immediate, scarce institutional resources offered by the UN.

For example, the former Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights Fionnuala Ní Aolain raised funds in her academic capacity, which enabled her frequent trips to the UN in New York where the relevant institutional counter-terrorism infrastructure for her mandate is located. This allowed her to blur institutional and geographical boundaries of the UN Security Council in New York and the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

In conclusion, as multilateralism and human rights are now increasingly under attack, my research suggests that we can learn from the history and growth of the Special Rapporteur system. Their unique room for manoeuvre, enabled by their independence and plural professional character, allows them to develop strategies and alliances across institutional and professional spaces to address widespread human rights violations, at the very least by raising awareness and speaking out against them. As the recent reappointment of Albanese as Special Rapporteur suggests, outspoken human rights experts with creative strategies to communicate their knowledge to the wider public are at the forefront of defending the universality of the international human rights system – and the integrity of their own expert body.