Human Rights Council: Italy to be assessed on 20 January 2025 for the Fourth Cycle of Universal Periodic Revision

Il 20 gennaio 2025, l’Italia verrà valutata all’interno del Quarto Ciclo della Revisione Periodica Universale, il meccanismo di verifica dell’Organizzazione delle Nazioni Unite (ONU) a cui sono sottoposti ogni quattro anni e mezzo i 193 Stati membri al fine di esaminarne la situazione in materia di diritti umani attraverso una modalità di peer review.

The process of review is held at a meeting of the UPR Working Group and consists of a moment of dynamic interaction between the member States, who may question,  give comments or make recommendations to the State under review, which will then converge in the so-called ‘outcome report’ drafted at the end of the meeting by the troika with input from the State under review and under the guidance of the Human Rights Council. Subsequently, the report will have to be adopted by the Working Group, which will then allow the State under review to make preliminary considerations of the recommendations received and whether or not to accept them.

The evaluation is made on the basis of three documents:

• the National Report, in which the State under review is asked to take stock of the status of implementation and any impact of recommendations received in previous cycles. In the case of Italy, it was drafted by a working group coordinated by the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Human Rights (CIDU) of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, preceded for the first time by the Mid-Term Report - Plan of the Implementation of Recommendations (PIR), which was sent to the United Nations on 4 November 2021 as an update on the progress achieved regarding the recommendations of the Third Cycle.
• the Compilation of information compiled by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which summarises the contributions submitted by various international organisations, including UN treaty bodies, and the civil society.
• the Summary of stakeholders’ submissions, also prepared by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which provides a synthesis of the contributions transmitted by national human rights institutions (NHRIs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society advocates, human rights defenders, universities and research centres.

The Compilation of information and the Summary of stakeholders’ submissions both aim to underline the most relevant human rights issues and to define the correct dispositions and recommendations to be made to the State under review, thus  offering different perspectives from the latter useful in achieving a fair assessment that reflects as much as possible the real situation in the country.