The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights
The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is a multilateral treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 16th of December 1966. However, it came into force on 23rd March 1976. This treaty commits its parties to respect civil and political rights of all individuals which include, freedom of religion, right to life, freedom of speech, electoral rights, freedom of assembly and rights to a due process on fair trial. By 2011 October, it had one hundred and sixty seven parties and seventy four signatories.
ICCPR is among the International Bill of Human Rights among others such as International Covenant on Economic Social Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). ICCPR is usually monitored by the Human Rights Committee. This is a separate body to the Human Rights Council. This committee reviews regularly reports on how the rights are being implemented. It is a requirement to the states to report one year after acceding to the covenant after which they will make any report once the committee asks them to do so. In most cases, the report is done after four years. The meeting of the committee is done in Geneva normally where they hold three sessions every year.
The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights started after the horrors of World War II. There was a broad consensus that emerged in the worldwide level that required individual human beings to be placed under the protection of the international community. This was prompted by the atrocities that were committed against specific ethnic groups. Therefore, the national government was supposed to take charge and ensure the life and liberty of their citizens is catered for. Some of the government institutions had turned out to be murderous and thus something had to be done. This caused a call for the atrocities being faced by human beings to be put to an end. The life of a human being should be protected and such atrocities as holocausts should never occur again.
At a San Francisco conference that happened in 1945, some Latin American countries appealed for a full code of human rights to be put in the charter of the United Nations. However, this initiative required a lot of care in its preparation and thus this motion never went through in the first stage. Nonetheless, human rights were adopted as a matter of principle. According to the charter, it contains references to human rights in the preamble and in different other articles. After the setting up of institutional machinery provided for by the charter, the new Human Commission on Human Rights started its work of creating International bills of Rights. The first step was to draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights Which was adopted by the General Assembly On December 10th 1948.
Drafting continued in the convention. However, there were differences between UN members on their relative importance especially on the negative Civil Political and Economic Social and cultural rights. This caused the convention to break into two separate covenants. The first convention was to have civil and political rights and the other one to have economic, social and cultural rights. However, these conventions contain very many similar provisions. Therefore, the first convention became an International Covenant on Economic and Cultural Rights while the second one became The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. This is how The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights came into being.
Incoming search terms:
- international covenant on civil and political rights
- international convention on civil and political rights
- difference between civil and political rights
- international convention of civil and political rights
- international covenant on civil and political rights what it contains
- international onvention on Civil and political rights
- international treaty on civil and political rights
- what are civil and political rights
- what are the critics on international convenant on civil and political rights
- civil & political rights after world war ii