Billaud, J. (2014) - Keepers of The Truth. Producing (Transparent) Documents For The Universal Periodic Review PDF

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Keepers of the truth: Producing ‘transparent’ documents for the Universal

Periodic Review
Chapter · January 2015

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316091289.006
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Keepers of the truth: producing ‘transparent’

documents for the Universal Periodic Review
julie billaud
It was the documents that finally got Swoboda down. His colleagues sup-
posed that the further postponement of his promotion had been the last
straw, but in fact it was the documents that did it. In the past he had been
ready to carry out the often tedious duties imposed on him by the
Organization – he was by nature almost too ready in this respect – but the
documents finally did it. It was too much.
Shirley Hazzard, People in Glass Houses
‘Welcome to the madhouse!’ This is how a civil servant greeted me on
my first day as an intern with the Field Operations and Technical
Cooperation Division (FOTCD) of the Office of the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva. As part of an
ethnographic study of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) I conducted
in 2011 with Jane Cowan, I decided to become embedded in the everyday
bureaucratic work of a team of UN drafters in charge of preparing the
documents for the twelfth session of the first UPR cycle. During my
three-month internship, I gradually came to grasp the meaning of my
new colleague’s playful warning. Not that anyone literally went mad
during the long hours spent recording on paper the content of the
interactive dialogue, but pressure was certainly high on drafters and
tension escalated, especially in the last hour preceding the submission
of a country’s final report. Similarly, in the poorly ventilated room of
Palais Wilson where drafters held their last meeting prior to the release
of the documents on which states would be assessed, impassioned dis-
cussions took place around the most effective strategy to adopt in order
to make documents speak. The everyday mundane bureaucratic rituals
I want to thank Hilary Charlesworth, Emma Larking and Jane Cowan for very helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
63
64 ritual, ritualism and the upr

involved in the drafting of documents were imbued with emotion, which
traversed a broad spectrum: from the boredom that came with the
repetition of lengthy bureaucratic procedures to the excitement after a
battle won over the content of a specific paragraph. In the high ceilinged
room of the historic palace with a view over Lac Léman, as the sun slowly
declined behind the Swiss mountains, drafters searched like treasure
hunters for the ‘most effective quote’, debated issues to raise in priority,
and engaged in vigorous conversations on where to place this or that
paragraph. This level of affective engagement contrasted dramatically
with the way I had initially envisioned office work.1 Even though the
work involved following tedious procedures such as verifying acronyms
on databases, classifying information and cross-checking quotes
extracted from other official UN sources, the production of documents
was a collective task entangled in broader rituals and social relations,
bringing together the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ and hence participating in
the creation of specific affective regimes and social imaginaries.
As central outcomes of the UPR, documents assume a fetish-like
status: posted on the OHCHR website, they have an official public
function and give visibility to issues that might otherwise be silenced
or ignored. Document production is a process through which human
rights standards and norms are collaboratively defined and negotiated.
In contrast to public verbal exchanges taking place during the interactive
dialogue, which (in spite of its promising title) does not provide much
room for negotiations, document production involves intense discus-
sions between the different stakeholders involved. The public event is
perhaps not the most interesting site from which to observe the UPR
drama: the most intense moments of the play take place off-stage, in the
meeting rooms where drafters devise narrative strategies, in the corri-
dors where diplomats bargain over recommendations with other state
representatives and in the offices where UN civil servants tailor like
craftsmen the paragraphs of a report reflecting the voices of ‘civil
society’. However, for these mountains of documents to be recognised
as ‘rationality badges’,2 they have to follow a certain form, use a specific
1
Yael Navaro-Yashin, ‘Make-Believe Papers, Legal Forms and the Counterfeit: Affective
Interactions Between Documents and People in Britain and Cyprus’ (2007) 7(1)
Anthropological Theory 79.
2
Annelise Riles, ‘Introduction: In Response’ in Annelise Riles (ed.), Documents: Artifacts
of Modern Knowledge (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006) pp. 1–40 at
11, citing Lee Clark, Missions Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster
(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999) p. 16.
keepers of the truth 65

language and correspond to a particular aesthetic.3 The production of
UN documents is therefore a highly sensitive and sophisticated exercise
that involves both ‘visibilisation’ and concealment,4 as well as a certain
command of diplomatic etiquette.
As a participant-observer involved in the regular work of the
Secretariat, I was able to identify some of the strategies developed by
the various actors involved in the UPR as they attempted to ‘reflect’ or
silence ‘issues of concern’. The verb ‘to reflect’ was consistently used by
the Secretariat as a way to emphasise the absence of subjective interpre-
tation. The verb ‘to reflect’ (as in to mirror) was preferred to the verb ‘to
represent’, which implies a certain degree of personal judgement. At the
same time, and in spite of the great caution drafters took to remain
‘impartial’, I came to realise that the methodology used by the Secretariat
for drafting documents, far from being fixed, was the product of intense
negotiations that involved knowledge claims, struggles over authority
and contested interpretations of the Secretariat’s mandate.
By studying the everyday documentation practices of the Secretariat’s
drafters, this chapter aims to provide insight into how core UPR princi-
ples such as ‘transparency’, ‘non-politicisation’ and ‘neutrality’ are inter-
preted and upheld. I show how the language of ‘transparency’ and ‘non-
politicisation’ presents the world it is supposed to objectively depict in a
decontextualised and technical manner. To speak the language of the UN
machine is an exercise in self-discipline that requires a certain cultural
capital and an insider’s knowledge of what is and what is not audible in
the UPR forum.
Affective life of documents

The premises of the OHCHR in Geneva are divided between two main
locations: Palais Wilson, with its splendid view over Lac Léman, and
Avenue Motta, a few hundred metres away from Palais des Nations, the
European headquarters of the UN. The OHCHR on Avenue Motta is a
modern building located behind a highly secured gate. As a new intern,
3
Ibid.; Annelise Riles, ‘Infinity within the Brackets’ (1998) 25(3) American Ethnologist
378; Iris Jean-Klein and Annelise Riles, ‘Introducing Discipline: Anthropology and
Human Rights Administration’ (2005) 28(2) PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology
Review 173.
4
Marilyn Strathern, Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and
the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000); Marilyn Strathern, ‘The Tyranny of
Transparency’ (2000) 26(3) British Educational Research Journal 309.

I was given the precious electronic badge that allows members of staff to
get through the revolving door and skip the security procedures reserved
for external visitors. The securitisation of the Office over the past decade
is a good indicator of the increased publicness of its utopian mission: ‘to
promote and protect human rights’.5 But what does this mission mean in
practice? What kind of work does a civil servant employed within one of
the divisions of the OHCHR have to perform in order to contribute to
the promotion and protection of human rights in the world? This is what
I intended to discover after going through the lengthy and complicated
intern recruitment procedure.
My supervisor, Manuela, was a Latin American woman in her early
40s whom I had initially interviewed in the context of my research. The
aim of this first discussion was for me to gain a deeper understanding of
the documentation process and of the role of the Secretariat in the UPR
in general. As she was trying to explain the complex administrative
routes that documents followed before their public release, she pulled
files from her shelves, showing me organisation charts, maps and various
UN reports that she placed in front of me with great excitement, as if
wanting to concretely illustrate her obscure explanations. Like a living
scanner, she ran her finger along documents to find the exact paragraph
making reference to the procedure she described. As she bombarded me
with acronyms and reference numbers of UN resolutions, I realised that
the only way to fully understand the mysterious bureaucratic world of
the Secretariat was to become part of it. Manuela could hardly believe my
offer to volunteer. ‘Are you really interested in this?’, she asked, looking
totally surprised. ‘Very much!’, I replied with enthusiasm. It took several
months to identify and fill in the requested forms, collect the necessary
support letters and find my way in the administrative labyrinth of the
UN before I could finally intern at the Office.
Equipped with an out-dated computer, a pile of files and a complete
set of pencils and highlighters, I sat in the glass office shared by interns,
trying to remember Manuela’s detailed instructions. ‘You will learn by
doing’, she had told me while handing over grey folders containing
documents of previous reviews from which I was supposed to find
inspiration. My mission was to produce several ‘summaries of
stakeholders’ information’ for states that would be reviewed later in the
year. This ten-page document summarising the contributions sent by
5
OHCHR, ‘Who We Are: Mandate’, www.ohchr.org/EN/ABOUTUS/Pages/Mandate.
aspx.

civil society organisations is one of two documents the Secretariat is in
charge of producing. The other (also ten pages) is called the ‘compilation
of UN information’ and contains material from treaty bodies, special
procedures and other UN agencies (UNDP, UNICEF, etc.).
The drafting process for these two documents followed an inter-
divisional methodology that mobilised the knowledge and expertise of
civil servants working in the four divisions of the OHCHR; the Research
and Right to Development Division (RRDD), the Human Rights Treaties
Division (HRTD), the Field Operations and Technical Cooperation
Division (FOTCD) and the Human Rights Council and Special
Procedures Division (HRC-SPD). In each of these divisions, four
drafters (called ‘UPR focal points’) under the supervision of one coor-
dinator were in charge of gathering the information that was required for
the division’s ‘input to the compilation/summary’. These teams of focal
points worked in close collaboration with a team of ‘drafters-
coordinators’ located within the Human Rights Council (HRC) Branch
responsible for collecting all the drafts and finalising the documents.
This inter-divisional method had been put in place in order to avoid the
personalisation of documents and prevent the association of documents
with a single author. This strategy, I was told, protects anonymity,
guarantees objectivity and enhances the bureaucratic legitimacy of the
material produced.
The task of putting together the summary of stakeholders’ informa-
tion was perceived as a sensitive and delicate activity. During the nego-
tiations that preceded the launch of the UPR, a number of states lobbied
to prevent civil society organisations from participating in the mecha-
nism. Finally, a consensus was reached and NGOs were authorised to
participate in a limited but nevertheless significant manner. They are not
allowed to take the floor during the ‘interactive dialogue’ but they may
provide written contributions to the OHCHR, lobby members of the
Working Group, and take the floor at the HRC during the adoption of
the report. Members of the Secretariat felt burdened with the responsi-
bility of preserving this fragile and often contested voice that came
directly from ‘the field’, as one of my colleagues pointed out.
The tension between the moral duty of protecting the ‘voices from the
field’ and the necessity of preserving the credibility of the institution
meant that drafters had to engage in myriad bureaucratic procedures
whose repetitive performance served to maintain the appearance of
neutrality, objectivity and transparency. My work then, as I came to
experience it, was an ant-like labour. It consisted in classifying

stakeholders according to their status (ECOSOC versus non-ECOSOC),
identifying the ‘best and most effective quote’ in a report consistent with
the word limit (‘the ones that summarise best the issues at stake’, as my
supervisor explained it to me – policy prevented drafters themselves
summarising key issues), and organising footnotes so that the author of
each quote could be easily identified, etc.
With the inflation of contributions as the first cycle of the UPR
progressed, the drafting of a ten-page summary could turn into a real
headache, necessitating the mobilisation of extra drafters and office
equipment. The Secretariat often relied on unpaid interns to help select
contributions, classify them in alphabetical order, and draw inventories
of ‘stakeholders’ and lists of ‘issues’. Preparing the summary for
Venezuela, for instance, took six weeks and involved five people.
Among the 600 ‘civil society’ contributions received, 80 per cent came
from Communal Councils praising the policies put in place by the
government. In order to avoid dismissing all these contributions at
once, the drafters decided to print them all and to classify them themati-
cally, according to the different issues they raised, so that they could be
quoted as a ‘group’ in different sections of the report. This division of
labour together with the pressure to ‘get things done’ on time often had
the effect of making meaning disappear behind the profusion of infor-
mation to process. As Lars Svendsen puts it, building on Walter
Benjamin’s reflections on the self-explanatory quality of ‘information’:6
‘meaning consists in inserting small parts into a larger, integrated con-
text, while information is the opposite . . . Information is handled or
“processed”, while meaning is interpreted’.7 As much as drafters were
actively involved in the construction of meaning, they were also caught
in a vice between the necessity to handle an increasing amount of data in
a restricted amount of time and their desire to preserve a sense of
purpose in their day-to-day work.
As an academic more acquainted with the search for meaning than
with the processing of information, boredom was constantly looming. A
source of distraction quickly became the coffee machine on the ground
floor that served tasteless espressos in paper cups and which I visited
several times a day to fight against sleepiness. The monotonous three-
6
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Hannah Arendt (ed.),
Harry Zohn (trans.), New York: Harcourt, 1968) pp. 88–9.
7
Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, revised edn (John Irons (trans.), London:
Reaktion Books, 2008) p. 29.

hour meetings of the UPR Working Group, which drafters had to listen
to through headphones in order to record and summarise their content,
provided a rather more soporific distraction. This experience, it seemed
to me, was emblematic of the modern condition. Indeed, the word
‘boredom’ with its contemporary meaning appeared in European lan-
guages with the individualisation of the self and the ‘death of God’ that
marked the Enlightenment. As Man took his place in the centre of the
universe, the notion of ‘time’ took on an entirely new dimension. With
each individual forced to provide his own source of meaning, boredom,
ironically, was democratised. ‘Boredom is the “privilege” of modern
man . . . The world has apparently become more boring’ Svendsen writes
in his book A Philosophy of Boredom.8 But was it this endless repetition
of tasks that I had to perform like an automaton that made me lose
interest, or was it a broader feeling of an absence of self-determination in
the production process? Was it alienation that I felt or simply
indifference?
I had imagined that the UN, as an institution with the power to attract
so many highly educated and skilled professionals from all over the
world, would provide more intellectually stimulating work than that
which was assigned to me. ‘How am I going to survive this?’, I desper-
ately asked Jane after my first day at the Office. Overwhelmed by a deep
feeling of uselessness, I became interested in finding out how drafters
kept a sense of purpose after months of work in a place that appeared to
me as a sort of ‘document factory’. I realised that if some drafters shared
my impressions of the banality so symptomatic in office work and were
eagerly looking for their next position, others emphasised the ways in
which the drafting of documents required an expertise that they had
developed after many years of involvement in the human rights field.
‘I . . . worked for the UN in many countries prior to joining the Office in
Geneva so I know the reality on the ground’, a drafter within the Human
Rights Treaties Division told me with confidence, as if wanting to make
clear that she knew the real world out there, behind the rows of folders
that covered the walls of her office.
This sentiment of taking part in the realisation of a broader ideal was
more obvious at the weekly meetings during which drafters shared their
concerns and their dilemmas over some of the contributions they had
received. The inclusion or exclusion of certain contributions was the
result of a process through which drafters had to elaborate intricate
8
Ibid. pp. 21–2.

justifications in order to prevent potential criticism from states.
According to an internal policy document (a document that was not
shared with NGOs), contributions would be excluded if submitted after
the deadline, if written by political parties or by members of parliament
or if written by individuals on behalf of an organisation. Contributions
using ‘abusive language’,9 such as direct accusations of government
officials, ‘second-hand information’ or written in a non-official UN
language had also to be rejected. ‘Stakeholders’ could include NGOs,
civil society organisations, associations of lawyers, trade unions, groups
of academic researchers, lobbyists, etc. All these rules were, however,
constantly negotiated and re-interpreted by drafters.
While drafting the summary of an African country, for example, I
came across a contribution submitted by a coalition of NGOs that
included two political parties banned in the country. Because the com-
pilation canvassed a number of urgent human rights issues and had been
endorsed by many local civil society organisations, I thought it brought
valuable information to the summary of stakeholders’ information.
When I raised this problem with my colleagues, I was told to make a
note to the drafter-coordinator and to put the contribution to the side.
During the next weekly team meeting, I managed to convince my
colleagues of the importance of the contribution. It was decided that
one of my colleagues would contact the head of the NGO coalition based
in the country in order to get details about the method used to draft the
contribution. The idea was to check whether the political parties
involved were using the UPR as a platform to get official recognition
from the international community. If the drafter felt that this was not the
case, then he would ask whether the coalition would consider removing
references to the two political parties mentioned in the list of contrib-
utors. The head of the NGO coalition happened to be a rather famous
human rights advocate who was kept under close watch by the govern-
ment and who immediately accepted the ‘deal’. This small victory
brought a feeling of satisfaction, which was otherwise severely lacking
in my routine work.
Our capacity to put ‘faces’ on the contributions we received by directly
getting in touch with human rights activists somewhat transformed our
9
Similar concerns with ‘violent language’ already existed among bureaucrats working at
the Minority Section of the League of Nations. See Jane K. Cowan, ‘Who’s Afraid of
Violent Language?: Honour, Sovereignty and Claims-making in the League of Nations’
(2003) 3(3) Anthropological Theory 271.

relationship to documents. It made drafters realise the efforts invested
and sometimes the dangers faced by civil society organisations in collect-
ing and disseminating such sensitive information. In spite of their formal
language, documents spoke to drafters in a very embodied manner,
making them acutely aware of their responsibility to remain true to the
message people living somewhere else in the world had asked them to
pass on to the international community. Because of their capacity to
mediate and represent, the documents did not simply function as tools of
governance – they also involved the production of subjectivities and
affective regimes. In spite of the myriad bureaucratic interventions that
aimed at evacuating emotion in order to foster an impression of cold
rationality, the documents linked people and places together, joining
them in an imagined affective and ethical community. In other words,
the affective space created by the circulation of documents enhanced
their ‘psychic life’.10 Stories of failures and successes11 affected individual
drafters’ sentiments of powerlessness or agency.
During our weekly meetings, it was not rare to hear stories of intim-
idation experienced by drafters as a result of their inclusion of contribu-
tions coming from NGOs critical of their government. The capacity of
drafters to resist the pressure of states was a source of great pride: to use
Stephen Hopgood’s metaphor for describing the work of Amnesty
International,12 it gave them a sense of power and authority in their
role as ‘keepers of the flame’ – a sense of agency that gave purpose and
meaning to the mundane and repetitive bureaucratic work they had to
perform.
But this autonomy had to be carefully justified: it was important to
document how we came to decide whether an organisation was trust-
worthy, since it was our responsibility to answer questions raised by
states. In the summary for China, for instance, a reference was made to
an NGO registered as a terrorist organisation in the country. At the same
time as China was preparing for its UPR, it presented its report to the
Committee Against Torture (CAT). CAT decided to reject the contribu-
tion from this organisation. China made it clear that, if the contribution
10
Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone
Books, 2012).
11
Jane K. Cowan, ‘The Success of Failure? Minority Supervision at the League of Nations’
in Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Tobias Kelly (eds.), Paths to International Justice:
Social and Legal Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2007) pp. 29–56.
12
Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (New
York: Cornell University Press, 2006).

appeared in the UPR summary, it would complain to the High
Commissioner. The UPR drafter decided to go against CAT’s decision
and China’s demand and to include the organisation in the summary.
This provoked a diplomatic crisis, but the drafter was able to support his
decision by demonstrating that he had followed clear procedures to
investigate the case and that the organisation could not seriously be
considered a terrorist group. Together, drafters designed a convincing
justification, demonstrating that they had consulted with their field
office, that the NGO was not involved in any illegal activities, and that
the human rights issues it raised in its report were supported by other
NGOs’ contributions. Eventually, CAT changed its mind and decided to
take into account the NGO’s shadow report as well. This small victory
proved the Secretariat’s independence and its capacity to trigger action
in other divisions of the HRC.
Transparancy obscured
In a series of lectures delivered in Berkeley in 1983 and published in 2001
under the title ‘Fearless Speech’, Foucault provides a genealogy of par-
rhesia (a figure of speech meaning ‘to speak freely’), a central theme of
Greek philosophy:13
[P]arrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific
relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life
through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people
through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a
specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty.
Foucault attempts to identify the foundations of the great tradition of

critique in Western philosophy and to highlight its impact on Western
politics by distinguishing between what he calls the ‘analytics of truth’
which is concerned with reasoning processes (what rational process
must be followed ‘in order to ensure a statement is true’), and the
‘critical attitude’, which is ‘concerned with the question of the impor-
tance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and
knowing why we should tell the truth’.14 He highlights how principles
and criteria of truth-telling became problematised in relation to the
exercise of power and to a broader questioning of the relations between
13
Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Joseph Pearson (ed.), Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001)
p. 19.
14
Ibid. p. 170.

freedom, democracy and education in ancient Greece. His main argu-
ment is that the activity of truth-telling in ancient Greece followed a
series of principles, techniques, norms and values that changed over time
when Athenian democracy was challenged and ‘truth’ gradually became
identified as a problem requiring philosophical inquiry. By looking at
‘truth’ from the perspective of an activity answering to the constantly
changing exigencies of power, Foucault is able to identify the type of
exercises and disciplines that philosophers crafted in order to recognise
and validate ‘truth-tellers’. He highlights how the ‘parrhesiastic contract’
between the ruler and those qualified to ‘tell the truth’ gradually shifted
from a relation based on courage and frankness to a more complex
relationship that required education and some sort of personal training.
To a great extent, the UPR can be identified as a truth-telling mech-
anism in the Foucauldian sense. The UPR is an exercise that involves a
certain discipline of speech and the mobilisation of specific forms of
knowledge. The classification and selection of information and their
strategic positioning in documents as well as the other procedures I
have described constitute disciplines and techniques followed by drafters
in order to abide by the rule of ‘transparency’, thereby bringing bureau-
cratic legitimacy to the documents they are in charge of producing.
These techniques and forms of knowledge serve to produce ‘the truth’
on the human rights situation of a country. It is their awareness of being
key stakeholders in this modern form of parrhesiastic contract that
provides drafters with a sense of moral agency and that explains their
emotional engagement with documents.
Since no single drafter can claim full authorship or remain in total
control of the final outcome, documents are endowed with a form of life
of their own. Documents can thus be considered as ‘mediators’, things
that ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the ele-
ments they are supposed to carry’.15 Drafters are nevertheless not totally
misguided in believing that they are part of a parrhesiastic contract,
which allows them to ‘speak freely’. As participants in a ritual whose
machinery aims to achieve both conformity and transformation
(‘making human rights real in the world’), their capacity to mobilise
the appropriate knowledge practices is assessed by their conformity to
the ritual’s consecutive phases. The procedures that regulate the docu-
mentation process can be understood as various steps of a ritual designed
15
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
(Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 39.

to ensure consistency and produce a communal artefact (the document)
that can be regarded as authoritative. By rigorously following each step
of the ritual, drafters ensure their belonging to the community of par-
rhesiastes, the keepers of the truth, endowed with the moral responsi-
bility to speak frankly, fearlessly and with authority. As one drafter told
me: ‘We [the Secretariat] write the scenario of the play and they [states]
perform [it]’. This theatrical metaphor poignantly illustrates drafters’
trust in the power conveyed by their position. Even though my conver-
sations with state representatives revealed that many of them collected
information elsewhere (from their own embassies, diplomatic partners
and NGOs) to write their recommendations, drafters’ belief in their
ability to effectively influence the system was a major source of
‘bureaucratic stamina’.16
The expertise that UN drafters have developed is, as in the case of the
Greek philosophers, the product of the exigencies and constraints of
power. Their ability to ‘speak the truth’ is strictly regulated even though,
as we saw in the previous section, they remain emotionally engaged with
the material they are in charge of translating into ‘proper UN language’.
Their emotional engagement can be interpreted as a sign of the serious-
ness with which they consider their role in the UPR ritual. Bruno Latour,
in comparing lawyers working at the French Conseil d’État and natural
scientists working in laboratories, insists on the ‘passion’ with which the
latter consider the object of research, while arguing that the ceremonial
performance in which lawyers are involved implies that they constantly
remain ‘at a distance’, unmoved by the issues at stake.17 The ‘libido
sciendi’ (awoken by the need to believe in and defend one’s discovery
in front of the scientific community), Latour argues, is substantially
different from the ‘libido judicandi’ (where the notion of ‘belief’ is by
necessity absent from legal proceedings). If the term ‘passion’ would not
be totally appropriate to define drafters’ relations with documents, their
detachment is only part of a public performance aimed at preserving an
aura of professional impartiality.
The mode of enunciation employed in document production is an
exercise in translation which, paradoxically, makes the documents very
16
Miia Halme-Tuomisaari, Human Rights in Action: Learning Expert Knowledge (Leiden:
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010).
17
Bruno Latour, ‘Scientific Objects and Legal Objectivity’ in Alain Pottage and
Martha Mundy (eds.), Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making
Persons and Things (Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 73–114.

difficult to decipher for strangers to this obscure bureaucratic genre. The
documents do not provide any room for an explanation of the political
and economic context or the history of the state under review so that
reports dealing with different countries often look strikingly similar. The
root causes of a country’s limited achievements in the field of human
rights are considered off-topic: only a short paragraph in each document
addresses ‘constraints and challenges’. The state (a form of political
organisation that encompasses a very large spectrum of realities) is
primarily responsible for protecting human rights, but the documents
do not address the material constraints faced by specific states. They
remain silent on the broader economic and political context in which
developing states have to operate, under the pressure of international
financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank. As Susan Marks argues, the focus on ‘violations’ tends to
make contextualised analysis irrelevant to human rights auditing mech-
anisms like the UPR:
[F]laws have been made to seem like simple misunderstandings or over-
sights, deficiencies of leadership or accountability, or quirks of local
history or culture. The idea that they may themselves be explicable
with reference to some wider systemic context has been mostly removed
from view. For all the insistence that human rights abuses and the
vulnerabilities which expose people to them are man-made disasters,
the drift of our analysis is that natural disaster is the model on which
the explanatory effort is imaginatively constructed.18
All documents have to follow the same disposition of paragraphs and are
written according to similar linguistic patterns (‘X notes that’, ‘Y recom-
mends that’, ‘Z is concerned that’). Since synthesising the material is not
permitted, summaries of stakeholders’ information are made up of a
collection of direct quotes extracted from NGOs’ contributions. Put
together, they resemble an assortment of sound-bites without any distinct
unifying melody. The cover page of each summary makes systematic
reference to these rules:
The present report is a summary of [XXX] stakeholders’ submissions to
the Universal Periodic Review. It follows the structure of the general
guidelines adopted by the Human Rights Council. It does not contain any
opinions, views or suggestions on the part of the Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), nor any
18
Susan Marks, ‘Human Rights and Root Causes’ (2011) 74(1) Modern Law Review 57,
77–8 (emphasis in original).

judgment or determination in relation to specific claims. The information
included herein has been systematically referenced in endnotes and, to the
extent possible, the original texts have not been altered. Lack of informa-
tion or focus on specific issues may be due to the absence of submissions
by stakeholders regarding these particular issues. The full texts of all
submissions received are available on the OHCHR website. The report
has been prepared taking into consideration the four-year periodicity of
the first cycle of the review. (emphasis added)
As with other documents used in other UN human rights monitoring

mechanisms, a report is considered compelling when it ‘utilizes the
expert human rights discourse; whether it articulates its message
through the appropriate terminology, acronyms and reference to rele-
vant documents’.19 The text is divided into sections (I, II, II . . .) and
subdivided into subsections (A, B, C) each of which is followed by
numbered paragraphs connecting documents in their aesthetics to
legal texts. This presentational mode ensures that UPR documents are
deeply anchored within the ‘spheres of legal knowledge’.20
To these linguistic ‘veils’ that function as signs of bureaucratic ration-
ality, structural barriers are added. The compartmentalisation of tasks
between the various divisions of the OHCHR, a strategy devised (as
explained in the previous section) in order to avoid personalisation,
further complicates tracking documents as they circulate from one office
to another. NGOs sending their contributions to the OHCHR cannot
verify whether their text has reached the responsible person. For exam-
ple, the HRC branch in Palais Wilson is in charge of receiving and
collecting the contributions of NGOs. Two secretaries keep a manual
registry in which the email addresses of NGOs, as well as their names and
the nature of their contributions (single or joint), are recorded. The
contributions and the registry are then placed in a computer hard
drive, which can be accessed by all FOTCD drafters located in the
Motta building. Because all this work is done manually, contributions
can be lost. In the case of Belgium, contributions from three NGOs never
reached the FOTCD office, in spite of the fact the NGOs were provided
with a certificate of reception.
This striking fact was revealed to me during a field trip to Belgium
during which I intended to trace the drafting of NGOs’ contributions as
well as the state report. When I talked to NGOs about their participation
19
Halme-Tuomisaari, Human Rights in Action, n. 16 above, p. 156.
20
Annelise Riles, ‘Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron
Cage’ (2006) 108(1) American Anthropologist 52, 54.

in the UPR of Belgium, several of them complained about this lack of
transparency. A human rights activist working for La Ligue des Droits de
l’Homme explained that he found the UPR less transparent than the
other UN human rights monitoring mechanisms because of all the filters
and limitations that had been put in place in order to restrict NGOs’
participation. He found that NGO contributions were watered down in
the summary made by the OHCHR and that the mechanism lacked
independent experts with the capacity to confront states critically. He
also felt that NGOs’ contributions ended up in a bureaucratic ‘black box’:
a centre of circulation where documents are gathered but whose trans-
formation process remains hidden. Latour describes ‘blackboxing’ as:
the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success.
When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one
need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal com-
plexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed,
the more opaque and obscure they become.21
While the OHCHR provides NGOs with guidelines on how to draft their
reports, it does not share any information on the ways in which it
transforms this material into the official summary of stakeholders’
information. NGO contributions end up in a black box whose internal
workings remain out of reach. It is this secrecy, one could argue, that
guarantees the ‘neutrality’ of the Secretariat in the eyes of states.
As a matter of fact, drafters have developed various strategies in order
to veil sensitive human rights issues. For example, placing the informa-
tion in the report involves strategic thinking. In order to respect the
sensitivities of certain states regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-
gender (LGBT) rights, these issues are systematically placed in the
section of the document related to the ‘right to privacy’ and not under
the ‘non-discrimination’ section, which would signify an ‘official’ recog-
nition of LGBT rights as a universal human rights concern. Issues related
to women’s rights in marriage are either placed in the ‘non-
discrimination’ section or in the ‘right to family life’ section, according
to how the drafter anticipates the state under review will react. These
techniques aim at veiling controversial human rights issues so as to
accommodate the sensitivity of states. They also ensure that the appear-
ance of neutrality and non-politicisation is maintained.
21
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Sciences Studies (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) p. 304.
Politics of ‘non-politicisation’
Once the first drafts of the documents have been finalised, the meeting of
the Country Consultative Group (CCG) is called. This meeting, which
usually takes place about ten weeks before the review, gathers together
the drafters from the different divisions who have been involved in the
production of the documents: one Focal Point from each of the four
divisions of the OHCHR, the drafter-coordinator from the HRC Branch
and the geographic desk officer who covers the state under review. The
presence of the geographic desk officer is important because they vali-
date the accuracy of the information provided in the documents since
he/she is supposed to be in direct contact with the ‘field’. The meeting
usually takes place at Palais Wilson and lasts several hours, until all the
questions regarding the documents have been raised and agreement has
been reached regarding issues that should be prioritised.
The objectives of the meeting are to highlight contentious issues for
the selected reader (head of division) to decide upon, to maintain a
balance in the types of issues presented (civil and political rights versus
economic, social and cultural rights), to ensure complementarity and
consistency between the summary and the compilation and to select the
information that should be given priority in the documents. The meeting
of the CCG is a strategic moment at which drafters decide which issues
should be emphasised. ‘We have in-house discussions on what is rele-
vant. We don’t pick and choose’, a drafter told me. Drafters share the
opinion that CCG meetings are very important because they guarantee a
‘balanced’ representation of the human rights situation on the ground.
Most drafters consider the CCG procedure and the specific expert
knowledge mobilised during this last drafting phase as crucial in pro-
ducing ‘reliable’ documents. Any attempt to interfere in CCG decisions
is therefore perceived as a threat to the credibility of the documents.
Managers, who are the gatekeepers of the Secretariat, do not participate
in these meetings and drafters are very cautious to preserve the authority
of the CCG as a group.
The CCG meeting about Syria represents a good example of the
strategies developed by drafters to maintain the credibility of the
OHCHR while attempting to ‘reflect the human rights situation in the
state under review’ objectively. The meeting was particularly challenging
because, while the drafting of the documents occurred, a popular upris-
ing was being violently repressed by the Syrian government, with many
civilians killed by state security forces during anti-government

demonstrations. Most of the information contained in the documents
referred to major human rights violations that, to a great extent, prefig-
ured the events that were unfolding as CCG members met at Palais
Wilson. Drafters were therefore very much aware of the potential dip-
lomatic weight of these documents in the process of finding a peaceful
resolution to the conflict.
One of the concerns of OHCHR civil servants during this meeting was
to preserve a ‘technical’ language, pointing to specific conventions and
treaties which represented the basis on which Syria could be held
responsible under international human rights law. For instance, the
compilation made reference to a ‘reservation’ to the Convention
Against Torture, and more precisely, to Syria’s adoption of Article 20.
Article 20 was ‘technically’ identified as a declaration by which a state is
authorised to reject inquiry procedures in cases of torture allegations. It
was therefore confirmed that Syria did not make any reservation to the
Convention but simply used its right to reject missions of investigation
in cases of torture. In practice, ‘technicality’ was associated with clarify-
ing the exact dates when recommendations were made and laws were
passed, as well as ensuring the use of the original titles for laws and
policies. Drafters never allowed themselves to make any comment on the
content of these laws and policies but rather focused on ensuring exacti-
tude in the legal terminology used in the documents.
Another concern was choosing the most appropriate and legitimate
human rights entity to quote. A long time was spent discussing whether
it was strategically more beneficial to quote the High Commissioner or
the Deputy High Commissioner or simply a resolution of the HRC.
Notions of neutrality and authority informed these discussions. Some
drafters felt that quoting a HRC resolution was more productive than
quoting the High Commissioner, since resolutions were the result of
decisions taken by member states themselves. Others felt that the voice
of the High Commissioner was endowed with the highest level of
authority.
Drafters were concerned with respecting the sensitivity of states and
avoiding ‘politicisation’. One asked whether it was common practice to
name the source countries for refugees. This question related to a para-
graph of the compilation which mentioned refugees from Iraq and
Palestine who lived in Syria. A CCG member explained that there was
no standard practice on this specific matter. For example, Iran was
particularly sensitive to the issue of Iranian refugees and China to the
issue of Tibetan refugees. To avoid objections from these countries,

drafters tended to remain more general in their phrasing, only mention-
ing the problem of refugees without naming their country of origin. In
the case of Syria, the reference to Palestinian refugees was retained,
taking into consideration the fact that Palestinian refugees were scat-
tered throughout the region: it was a well-known problem that could not
be avoided.
A drafter brought to the attention of CCG members a paragraph
referring to Israel’s occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights. The para-
graph provided that: ‘The Human Rights Council, in a number of
resolutions, expressed deep concern at the suffering of Syrian citizens
in the occupied Syrian Golan due to the systematic and continuous
violation of their fundamental and human rights since the foreign
military occupation of 1967’. ‘Is this a ‘political’ issue?’, he asked.
Another drafter suggested that the CCG develop an argument in order
to keep the paragraph in the compilation. He thought the plight of
Syrians under foreign military occupation was a serious matter because
of the systematic violation of their most basic human rights. He said that
the High Commissioner had highlighted this issue on numerous occa-
sions and that if necessary it was relatively easy to support this statement
with quotes from the High Commissioner. It was agreed that this argu-
ment had to be kept in mind in the event that Israel objected to this
paragraph of the report.
Despite striving to remain ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’, the meeting
revealed the sensitivities of individual drafters and their specific con-
cerns over certain issues. For example, in reference to a paragraph deal-
ing with transmission of nationality through marriage, M, a drafter of
Palestinian origin, requested that a specific reference be made to ‘the
special measures taken to cater for the political principles applicable to
Palestinians’. Using diplomatic language, M acknowledged that it was a
personal demand he made to the CCG to ensure that the right of return
of his compatriots was preserved. Female drafters tended to be more
concerned with children’s and women’s rights than male drafters. For
instance, S was concerned about the fact that the compilation did not
make any reference to corporal punishment of children at home. She
asked the staff of the Human Rights Treaties Division to check whether
the Committee for the Rights of the Child (CtRC) had mentioned this
issue in its report on Syria, since the summary made specific reference to
it. This tendency was further revealed when a male drafter questioned
the pertinence of a paragraph referring to temporary marriages of young
girls and asked whether the CCG should not emphasise ‘more serious

issues’. Female drafters found this comment unfortunate, and insisted on
the fact that because the CtRC had raised the issue, it could not be
ignored.
While reviewing the compilation, drafters also reviewed the summary
in order to ensure coherence and complementarity between the two
documents. Drafters who had been given the responsibility of searching
for additional information noted questions that could not be answered
immediately, and the geographic desk officer promised he would liaise
with the field office in order to get the most up-to-date information. In
the days that followed the meeting, emails were exchanged between CCG
members so that the drafter-coordinator could finalise the documents.
These last versions were then sent to the field office for final validation.
Through their capacity to speak within the limits of the ‘system’, drafters
developed a sense of moral agency that gave meaning and purpose, as well
as bureaucratic legitimacy, to their work. ‘Transparency’, ‘neutrality’ and
‘non-politicisation’ were preserved by following procedures and rules,
which were nevertheless constantly negotiated and interpreted by individ-
ual drafters. By engaging in such vigorous debates, Secretariat members
strengthened their self-perception of belonging to a class of experts
endowed with the power to fashion and shape representations of human
rights in the world. Paradoxically, it is their capacity to abide by the rules
and regulations of the UN human rights system (and hence to exclude those
who do not) that allows the creation of an imagined ethical community
binding together ‘real’ local people on the ground and the various anony-
mous actors that compose the ‘international community’. In this respect,
the principle of ‘non-politicisation’ that guides the UPR can be seen as non-
democratic in the sense used by Jacques Rancière. Rancière argues that ‘[d]
emocracy is the power of those who have no specific qualification for ruling,
except the fact of having no qualification . . . the demos – the political
subject as such – has to be identified with the totality made by those who
have no “qualification”’.22 It is because their ‘expertise’ is qualified as
bureaucratically valid that drafters are institutionally authorised to ‘speak
for’ those who do not qualify to speak for themselves within the system. By
evacuating the ‘dissensus’ that is necessary for the opening of an interval for
political subjectivisation23 and by promoting ‘consensus’, a process that
turns conflicts ‘into problems that have to be sorted out by learned expertise
22
Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ (2004) 103(2/3) South
Atlantic Quarterly 297, 305.
23
Ibid. 306.

and a negotiated adjustment of interests’,24 such documentation practices
tend to relegate to the background the real human voices that exist behind
the abstract ‘Rights of Man’. Even if most drafters are guided by moral
considerations in their everyday work, this ethical endeavour has the para-
doxical effect of artificially bridging the gap between representations and
facts. Because it is precisely this gap that usually triggers political resistance
‘from below’, expert knowledge practices tend to flatten reality by disguising
the existence of certain human rights failures, thereby making the universal
promise of human rights more plausible. The doctrine of good intention
that guides their action poorly compensates for the blurring of the boundary
between facts and representations that documentation practices tend to
perpetuate. What ‘is’ on paper becomes what really exists in the world ‘out
there’: the word IS the fact.
Concluding remarks
Most academic work dealing with bureaucracies has highlighted the
various techniques used in modern bureaucracies to obviate individual
agency.25 Bureaucracies are often described as governance apparatuses
that categorise people in order to discipline them, so that ‘[t]he human-
ness of the human condition gets lost in the files, the halls, the shufflings
of bureaucratic administration’.26 As documents are ‘artifacts of modern
knowledge’,27 they perhaps best exemplify what is at stake in bureauc-
racies: a sociality organised by form where content fades away behind the
aesthetics of logic and language, producing acceptable modes of impar-
tiality. By creating the illusion of unmediated and rational vision, doc-
umentation processes mask the exercise of power whose gaze seems to be
‘from nowhere and everywhere at once’.28
24
Ibid.
25
Max Weber, Economy and Society, revised edn (Guenther Ross and Claus Wittich
(trans.), Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1978) pp. 965–1005;
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, new edn
(New York: Penguin Books, 2006); Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of
Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
26
Anya Bernstein and Elizabeth Mertz, ‘Introduction – Bureaucracy: Ethnography of the
State in Everyday Life’ (2011) 34(1) PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 6, 7.
27
Riles, Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, n. 2 above.
28
Colin Hoag, ‘Assembling Partial Perspectives: Thoughts on the Anthropology of
Bureaucracy’ (2011) 34(1) PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 81, 82.

If it is undeniable that a bureaucratic mandate dramatically constrains
individual initiative, the apparent certainty provided by bureaucratic
rules, tools and procedures is mythical. As the material I have presented
in this chapter demonstrates, UN drafters are not simply bureaucrats
blindly applying rules. They like to see themselves as experts endowed
with a certain level of discretion to reflect the human rights situation in
specific parts of the world. Drafters use personal decision-making styles
and preferences despite the existence of uniform guidelines. In practice,
drafters constantly interpret rules according to moral and ethical con-
siderations in order to give meaning to otherwise extremely repetitive
tasks. However, the imperative of ‘non-politicisation’ forces them to use
a technical language that presents information in a specific way. The
Secretariat can therefore be seen as a ‘black box’ in the Latourian sense of
the term: a site of circulation where only inputs and outputs are known,
but where transformation processes remain hidden from view. This level
of secrecy is what makes the UPR a ‘hope-generating machine’29 which
relies less on logic and the consistent application of clear rules than on
specific rituals and affective regimes.
29
Monique Nuijten, Power, Community and the State: The Political Anthropology of
Organisation in Mexico (London: Pluto Press, 2003) p. 16.
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