Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association

UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association

Incumbent
Maina Kiai
since May 1, 2011
Term length Three years
Inaugural holder Maina Kiai
Formation UN Human Rights Council resolution 15/21 (October 2010)
Website Freeassembly.net

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association works independently to inform and advise the United Nations Human Rights Council. The Special Rapporteur examines, monitors, advises and publicly reports on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association worldwide.[1]

The position was created by Human Rights Council resolution 15/21 in October 2010. This position is voluntary, and the expert is not United Nations staff nor paid for his/her work.[1]

The first mandate-holder, Maina Kiai, took up his duties on May 1, 2011, for an initial period of three years. He began his second three-year term in May 2014. Kiai is a lawyer and human rights defender from Kenya.[2][3]

Mandate

The Special Rapporteur is mandated to gather all relevant information relating to the promotion and protection of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association throughout the world. The Special Rapporteur is also mandated to make recommendations on ways to ensure the promotion and protection of these rights, to report on rights violations, and to issue reports on his findings.[1]

The mandate was initially established for three years. In September 2013, it was extended for an additional three years, through 2017.[4]

Working methods

In the discharge of his mandate, the Special Rapporteur:

Work of the current Special Rapporteur

As of March 2016, current Special Rapporteur Kiai has presented five reports to the Human Rights Council on the subjects of:

In October 2013, he presented his first report to the UN General Assembly, on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association in the context of elections.[22][23] He presented his second report to the General Assembly - exploring the effect that multilateral institutions have on promoting and protecting assembly and association rights - in October 2014.[24] His third report to the General Assembly (October 2015) was a comparative study of the "enabling environments" that states create for businesses and associations; it found that businesses generally get much more favorable treatment.[25] Kiai has also made seven official country visits, to Georgia (2012), the United Kingdom (Jan. 2013 & April 2016), Rwanda (Jan. 2014), Oman (Sept. 2014), Kazakhstan (Jan. 2015), Chile (Sept. 2015), the Republic of Korea (Jan. 2016) and the United States of America (July 2016).[26][27]

As of June 2016, Kiai has issued more than 140 press statements via OHCHR [28] and sent over 900 communications to UN member states.[29]

Kiai also attends numerous conferences and meetings on the subject matter of his mandate and convenes consultations with various stakeholders on the subject.[30][31]

In 2014, Freedom House awarded Kiai its Freedom Award, an acknowledgment begun in 1943 "to extol recipients’ invaluable contribution to the cause of freedom and democracy."[32] Prior Freedom Award honorees include Chen Guangcheng, Aung San Suu Kyi, Vaclav Havel, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Medgar Evers, and Edward R. Murrow.

In October 2016, Kiai received the United Nations Foundation's Leo Nevas Award for his work as Special Rapporteur. The award recognizes "those who have served as agents of change in advancing international human rights."[33]

In response to continued significant police conflict with the Black Lives Matter and other social movements in the US, he conducted the first ever official country visit to the United States by a Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in July 2016.[34]

References

See also

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