Organizational meeting of the Human Rights Council

Mr. President,
Excellencies,
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you, Mr. President, for inviting me to address this organizational meeting of the Human Rights Council. I am grateful for this opportunity to update you all on the subject of resources provided to the UN Office at Geneva to service the Council, two and a half years after I first spoke to you on this subject, with the Under-Secretary-General for General Assembly and Conference Management, Catherine Pollard.

In August 2016, Ms. Pollard and I had conveyed our serious concern at the growing gap between resources available to UNOG and the volume and complexity of services requested by the Council. We explained that the General Assembly does not allocate specific funds to service the regular activities of the Council. Core resources for this purpose are subsumed under the funds allocated to UNOG under Section 2, Section 23, Section 29E and Section 35 of the budget. We also noted that while the number of the Council’s meetings had gone up by 20 percent between 2012 and 2016, budgets of the divisions of administration and conference management were cut by about 10 percent, and funds for General Temporary Assistance allocated to the Information Service were cut by 30 per cent.

Let me remind you, as I had done then, that each time you meet, interpreters and conference officers ensure that your meetings can proceed smoothly and in the six official languages. Each time you meet, security guards issue badges for participants and screen them, stand outside the room and ensure security. Each time you meet, audiovisual technicians and operators must ensure that the complex sound system in this and other rooms works to your satisfaction. And each time you meet, the Information Service produces a summary of your discussions in the form of press releases published in English and French a few hours after the end of the meeting.

In accordance with General Assembly resolution 56/242 of 18 January 2002, meetings should normally be held during regular hours. In other words, the Council is expected to meet twice a day, or one hundred times over the 50 days of its annual sessions. By 2016, the Council was meeting in the morning, at lunchtime, in the afternoon, and sometimes in the evening. It held a total of 154 meetings in the ten weeks of its three sessions. So it was basically cramming into ten weeks more than 15 weeks-worth of meetings. Resources were never made available to us for this level of activity. Many permanent missions also found this unsustainable.

So we raised the alarm and called for the Bureau to work with us to find solutions. We said we should aim to cap the total number of meetings per year at 130, although I warned that even that figure may prove difficult. I am truly grateful that my call was heard. Joint concerted efforts, including those of Ambassador Šuc, the Council’s previous President, and the 2017 Joint Task force chaired by Ambassador Zellweger of Switzerland, have already borne some fruits. The trend towards a steady increase in meetings by the Council has now been reversed, and the number of meetings has been stabilized and even reduced. In 2017 and 2018, the Council held 142 meetings during its three sessions.

However, the Council still meets well above the 100 meetings normally held in 10 weeks, and while we stopped servicing evening meetings in 2017, we continue to service meetings in the morning, at noon and in the afternoon on most days of your sessions. And in the meantime, resources have continued to decrease since I first talked to you. The budget of the Division of Conference Management was cut by two percent in the current 2018-2019 biennium as compared to the previous biennium. Likewise, the Division of Administration, which employs the sound operators and technicians through its central support services, has had to face a 10% cut in contractual services and its resources for temporary assistance of meetings were also reduced by 5%.

Luckily, in 2018, the Department of Public Information in New York provided a one-off transfer of funds to our Information Service that allowed it to continue its press coverage during last September’s session. And because the Human Rights Treaty Bodies did not meet as much as expected in 2018, we were able to use more of our overall resources for the Council to ensure that conference services, including interpretation were not disrupted.

I very much regret that some have interpreted these special favorable circumstances and our strenuous efforts to support the Council as an indication that the situation was not as dire as I had said, raising even doubt as to the veracity of my statements. Let me assure you once again that I do not take these statements lightly, and that I would not come to you if I was not genuinely concerned about our ability to service you. As you may know, UNOG has now been asked to prepare a budget submission for 2020 showing a further 2.5 per cent reductin in resources. We do not know what the budget negotiations during the fall session of the General Assembly will actually yield for 2020 or even, for that matter, if the resources appropriated for 2019 will be allotted given the Organization’s dire budgetary situation. We do know that the Information Service will in any case not have the means to provide coverage in its current form for the September session this year.

I strongly urge you, therefore, to pursue in 2019 the efforts started in 2017 and 2018 to rationalize the Council’s programme of work and further reduce its number of meetings.

Excellences,
Mesdames et Messieurs,

Je viens de vous parler longuement de ressources financières. Certains se demandent peut-être s’il suffirait de demander des ressources supplémentaires pour remédier au problème et permettre au Conseil de prolonger ses sessions ou d’en ajouter une chaque année. Malheureusement pas. Outre que comme je l’ai souligné, une telle demande aurait bien peu de chance d’aboutir par les temps qui courent, le manque de salles de réunion et le temps nécessaire pour traiter les documents entre les sessions limiteraient de toute façon la possibilité d'ajouter des réunions au calendrier.

Et le manque de salle va s’exacerber pendant les années à venir. Le Plan stratégique du patrimoine prévoit, comme vous le savez, qu’entre 2021 et 2023, ce bâtiment E sera entièrement fermé. La salle XX et les autres grandes salles seront toutes indisponibles et le Conseil et son groupe de travail pour l’examen périodique universel devront se réunir dans la salle des Assemblées. Si les travaux sont actuellement axés sur la construction du nouveau bâtiment H, la rénovation des bâtiments historiques commencera dès cet automne et devrait s'achever d'ici la fin 2021. Il s'agira notamment de rénover les bâtiments A et C.

Étant donné qu'un grand nombre de salles de conférence ne seront pas disponibles pendant de longues périodes, il ne sera plus possible d'attribuer au Conseil six salles de réunion supplémentaires pour les consultations intergouvernementales et les manifestations parallèles, comme c'est le cas actuellement pendant ses sessions. Seules trois salles pourront être allouées à cette fin pendant la 43ème session du Conseil et jusqu'à la 47ème session. Ceci signifie que des mesures devront donc être prises pour limiter le nombre de réunions parallèles au Conseil.

Mesdames et Messieurs les délégués,

L’Office des Nations Unies à Genève a été conçu pour accueillir et servir les réunions d’organes intergouvernementaux de première importance tel que le Conseil des droits de l’homme. Vous pouvez donc entièrement compter sur notre assistance. Nous continuerons de faire de notre mieux, jour après jour, pour que vos délibérations se déroulent dans les meilleures conditions possibles. Mais il faut nous aider à vous aider.

Je suis sûr que nous trouverons des solutions durables à tous ces défis financiers et logistiques par un dialogue constant entre mes services et le Bureau du Conseil.

Je vous remercie.