National human rights action plans: An inventory
This study decrypts the global diffusion of national human rights action plans (NHRAPs) since the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights. The conference’s final statement – the ‘Vienna Declaration and Platform of Action’ – encouraged states to adopt NHRAPs. States seldomly engaged with the tool at the first, and the UN quickly deprioritised support to NHRAPs. Eventually, they remained largely unaccounted for and under-researched.
The major contribution of the study is to set the record straight in terms of states’ engagement with NHRAPs. Based on six years of meticulous research conducted by the Danish Institute for Human Rights, in collaboration with former OHCHR Regional Representative David Johnson, the study puts forward an original and comprehensive inventory of plans. It reveals that at least 140 NHRAPs have been adopted in 75 countries, meaning that the diffusion of NHRAPs is far more significant than accounted for so far.
The study discusses an apparent paradox: states limitedly adopted NHRAPs when the model was actively promoted by international organisations and supported by guidance and soft law, but more than half the NHRAPs were adopted after 2012, at a time when the tool was deprioritised by international human rights actors. New oversight patterns that emerged with the Universal Periodic Review appear to explain this situation.
This report is part of MATTERS OF CONCERN - a working paper series focusing on new and emerging research on human rights across academic disciplines. It is a means for staff at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, visiting fellows and external researchers to make available the preliminary results of their research, work in progress and unique research contributions. Research papers are published under the responsibility of the author alone and do not represent the official view of the Danish Institute of Human Rights.
Overall, the study argues that NHRAPs requires more critical attention, to understand whether, and under which conditions, they influence human rights implementation. Accrued knowledge based on empirical research is key to informing future state practice as well as a pre-requisite for the promotion by norm entrepreneurs of new planning models.
As 2023 will mark the 30th anniversary of the Vienna Declaration, this new overview, as well as further research that it could inspire, appears a timely intervention. This is even more so the case as NHRAPs are being revived by various actors. Nationally, national human rights institutions, such as those of Denmark and India, continue to advocate for their governments to launch NHRAP processes. Internationally, since 2017, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has been systematically calling on states to adopt NHRAPs in follow-up letters to states following their UPR reviews.
The full inventory of NHRAPs themselves is made available for researchers and practitioners, at the link below. Readers are invited to help us maintaining the inventory of NHRAPs updated, by contacting the author at selo@humanrights.dk.
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