The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is a department of the United Nations Secretariat that works to promote and protect human rights that are guaranteed under international law and stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The office was established by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 December 1993 in the wake of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights.
France has been a member of the United Nations (UN) since its foundation in 1945 and is one of the five countries, alongside China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that holds a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), which is responsible for maintaining international peace and security.
Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad bin Zeid al-Hussein is a Jordanian former diplomat who is the Perry World House Professor of the Practice of Law and Human Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the president and CEO of the International Peace Institute. He also served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2014 to 2018. He played a central role in the establishment of the International Criminal Court, and was elected the first president of the Assembly of State Parties of the International Criminal Court in September 2002. He also served as a political affairs officer in UNPROFOR in the former Yugoslavia from 1994 to 1996.
Patricia Espinosa Cantellano is a Mexican diplomat who served as the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2016 to 2022. She was Secretary of Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of President Felipe Calderón; and served as Mexican Ambassador to Austria, Germany, Slovenia and Slovakia. Because of her diplomatic career, she was appointed Ambassador Emeritus of Mexico in 2012.
María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés is an Ecuadorian politician and diplomat. She was the President of the United Nations General Assembly for the 73rd session from 2018 to 2019. She served as Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Lenín Moreno from May 2017 to June 2018. She also held several other Ministerial posts before, including as Minister of National Defense of from 28 November 2012 to 23 September 2014. She served as the Permanent Representative of Ecuador to the United Nations in Geneva from 2008 to 2009 and again from October 2014 to May 2017. Besides her political career she is also a poet and essayist.
Catherine Pollard is a diplomat who has been serving as Under Secretary-General of the United Nations for Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance since 2019. From 2015 until 2019, she was the Coordinator for Multilingualism for the United Nations; in this capacity, she also served as Under Secretary-General of the United Nations for General Assembly and Conference Management.
Jan Margaret Beagle is a diplomat from New Zealand who has been serving as the Director-General of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) since 2020. From 2017 until 2019, she was the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations for Management, appointed to this position by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on 1 June 2017. She then served as Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on Systemwide Implementation of Chief Executive Board decisions.
Discussions of LGBT rights at the United Nations have included resolutions and joint statements in the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), attention to the expert-led human rights mechanisms, as well as by the UN Agencies.
Elisabeth Steiner is an Austrian jurist a former Judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Christian Wenaweser is a Liechtenstein diplomat. He is currently serving as the Permanent Representative of Liechtenstein to the United Nations.
Peter Maurer is a Swiss diplomat who was the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from 1 July 2012 until October 2022 and is currently President of the Basel Institute on Governance.
Maria-Pia Ludovika Ulrika Elisabeth Paschaline Katharina Ignazia Lucia Johanna Josefa Kothbauer, Princess of Liechtenstein, is the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Liechtenstein to Austria and the Czech Republic, formerly also to Belgium and the European Union. She also serves as Liechtenstein's Permanent Representative to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and to the United Nations.
Elhadj As Sy is a Senegalese humanitarian aid expert who served as the Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) from 2014 until 2019.
Women in law describes the role played by women in the legal profession and related occupations, which includes lawyers, paralegals, prosecutors, judges, legal scholars, law professors and law school deans.
Amina Bouayach is a Moroccan human rights activist. Since December 2018, Bouayach has served as the president of the Moroccan National Human Rights Council. In this role, she affirmed in 2019 that there are no "political prisoners in Morocco."
Oľga Algayerová is a Slovak diplomat and the former-Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. She replaced Christian Friis Bach of Denmark.
International Gender Champions (IGC) is a network of female and male leaders of member states, international organizations, and civil society working for gender equality. It is an initiative of Women@TheTable, and was founded in 2015 by Caitlin Kraft-Buchman of Women@TheTable, Ambassador Pam Hamamoto, Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations in Geneva, and Michael Møller, the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and current Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva.
Ghada Fathi Waly is an Egyptian politician who has been serving as the director-general/executive director of the United Nations Office at Vienna (UNOV)/United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) since 2020, following her appointment by Secretary-General António Guterres. She holds the rank of Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Marcia Vaune Jocelyn Kran is a Canadian lawyer and expert member of the UN Human Rights Committee. Kran's career has spanned international human rights law, criminal law and political science for over forty years, and includes positions in academia and civil society. Kran has held a range of senior United Nations positions including in international human rights law.
Claudia Mahler is an Austrian academic who became the second UN Independent Expert on the human rights of older persons at the United Nations Human Rights Council. Dr. Mahler assumed her role as Independent Expert in May 2020. She is also a senior researcher in the field of economic, social and cultural rights for the German Institute for Human Rights since 2010. She was also a visiting professor at the Alice Salomon Hochschule in 2020–2021.
