Informal Briefing of the Human Rights Council

Mr. President, members of the Council, distinguished delegates, dear colleagues:

Let me thank the President at the outset for convening this meeting. I am also very grateful to my colleague Catherine Pollard, Under-Secretary-General for General Assembly and Conference Management, who has travelled from New York to speak to you today.

I would like to assure you of my commitment, and that of my colleagues at the UN Office at Geneva and DGACM, to facilitate to the best of our ability the crucial work of the Human Rights Council, an organ which in ten years has acquired a central role in the work of the United Nations. The Council, however, is a victim of its own success, and the programme of work for its sessions has become extraordinarily heavy. Several of you have in fact voiced concern that the workload of the Council is now unmanageable and that you would soon have to give up on sleep altogether during its sessions.

A few weeks ago, therefore, I asked to meet with the President to convey to him my serious concern at the growing gap between resources available to UNOG and the volume and complexity of services requested by the Council. This gap has now reached such critical level that further growth in the activities of the Council can no longer be absorbed by UNOG. The President has kindly suggested that we meet to discuss the way forward and how UNOG can best service the Council within the limit of its resources.

Catherine will discuss in details the impact of the Council’s meetings on resources provided for conference management in interpretation, meeting support and document processing. I wanted for my part to highlight the strain under which all other UNOG services in security, public information and central support in particular, find themselves during the sessions of the Council following repeated reductions in budgetary allocations to UNOG by the General Assembly.

As you know, the General Assembly does not allocate specific funds to service the regular activities of the Council, and 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. While the number of the Council’s meetings has gone up by 20 percent between 2012 and 2016, budgets of the divisions of administration and conference management have been cut by about 10 percent. We are facing the real possibility that UNOG’s resources may be further reduced for the next biennium, 2018-2019.

Each time you meet, security guards issue badges for participants and screen them, stand outside the room and undertake a security assessment. Since 2012, the number of potentially sensitive sessions taking place in Room XX during sessions of the Council has increased, with the number of meetings requiring additional staff raising from 10 in 2012 to 16 in 2014 and 18 in 2015.

Each time you meet, we need to make sure Room XX and all the other rooms used by the Council are fully operational. And this does not mean simply switching electricity on. Audiovisual technicians and operators must ensure that the complex sound system in this and other rooms works to your satisfaction. Full day scheduling of meetings by the Council increases the workload for operators by 75 per cent as compared to the normal schedule of two meetings per day and requires an extra team. Overall the workload generated by the Council for operators has increased by 50 per cent since 2010. The steep increase in the number of side-events, from 284 in 2013 to 520 forecasted for 2016, has also impacted the audiovisual technicians, operators and movers, as it has impacted our security officers.

Each time you meet, the UN Information Service in Geneva 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. These press releases are widely used, by journalists, non-governmental organizations and delegates alike to follow the work of the Council and report back on it. Until 2012, UNIS was able to cover the meetings of the Council with four persons. When the Council started adding lunchtime sessions, a fifth person had to be added and since 2015, there have been many weeks when a sixth person has had to be recruited. The increased number of meetings by the Council has also led to higher recruitment needs in terms of cameramen and photographers. Given the 30 percent cut in the funds for General Temporary Assistance allocated to it in the last five years, UNIS simply no longer has the funds required to cover your session next month. Funds may be exceptionally redeployed to allow for coverage during your September session. But such redeployment will not be possible in 2017.

And this is unfortunately a zero-sum game. Any resource redeployed to support the activities of the Council is taken away from servicing other inter-governmental bodies in which most of you also participate, or from the other activities of the Office. We cannot shortchange our other clients.

UNOG and the Council need to work together, therefore, to find a sustainable solution. As a starting point, we will cap the total number of meetings per year at 130 as of 2018. This would mean, in practical terms, that the Council should hold two less meetings on average per week of session than it currently does. While I understand how difficult your programming exercise is, such a reduction must surely be possible if evening and lunchtime sessions are kept to a minimum. As a transitional measure, UNOG would accept to service 135 meetings in 2017. Any request for meeting services above that level would be provided only if additional resources are made available by the General Assembly.

I must caution that should resources allotted to UNOG in the 2018-2019 biennium be in fact further reduced, this level of services may not be possible and the figures I have provided may have to come down.

In conclusion, let me stress again that UNOG aims to provide the Council with the support it needs and facilitate the important discussions among its members. In the current budgetary climate, however, we will be forced to cap the services we deliver. I hope that under the President’s leadership, the Council can identify solutions and plan its activities in a more sustainable manner.

I would now like to ask Catherine to present to you in greater details the situation as regards conference management . I am naturally ready, as are my colleagues, to answer your questions.

Thank you.