The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, commonly known as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) or the United Nations Human Rights Office, is a department of the Secretariat of the United Nations 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.
Special rapporteur are titles given to independent human rights experts whose expertise is called upon by the United Nations to report or advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective. Depending on the specific mandate, there can also be working groups composed of an independent expert from each of the five UN regional groupings. Their work falls within the scope of "special procedure" mechanisms under the United Nations Human Rights Council, and their contributions can advance human rights through a variety of activities, including, but not limited to improving access to redress, policy reform, mainstreaming human rights, raising human rights awareness, and acting to prevent or cease rights violations.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is a South African politician and former United Nations official, who served as the Executive Director of UN Women with the rank of Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.
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 outstanding career as a Mexican diplomat, 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.
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.
Winifred Byanyima, is a Ugandan aeronautical engineer, politician, human rights activist, feminist and diplomat. She is the executive director of UNAIDS, effective November 2019.
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. Maurer was born in Thun, Switzerland.
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."
Ing. Oľga Algayerová, MBA, M.A. is a Slovak diplomat and the 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.
The following lists events that happened with or in collaboration with the United Nations and its agencies in the year 2020.
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. In international human rights law, Kran has held a range of senior United Nations positions for nearly two decades.
Gabriele Kucsko-Stadlmayer is a jurist and a current judge of the European Court of Human Rights for Austria.
Claudia Mahler is an Austrian academic who currently serves as an Independent Expert on the human rights of older persons at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
