A collection of United Nations documents associated with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these volumes facilitate research into the scope of, meaning of and intent behind the instrument's provisions. It permits an examination of the various drafts of what became the thirty articles of the Declaration, including one of the earliest documents – a compilation of human rights provisions from national constitutions, organised thematically. The documents are organised chronologically and thorough thematic indexing facilitates research into the origins of specific rights and norms. It is also annotated in order to provide information relating to names, places, events and concepts that might have been familiar in the late 1940s but are today more obscure.

This work gathers together for the first time in a single publication the records of the multitude of meetings which, in the context of the newly established United Nations, led to the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on 9 December 1948. This work will enable academics and practitioners easy access to the Genocide Convention’s travaux préparatoires – an endeavour that has until now proven extremely difficult. This work will be of paramount importance for the international adjudication of the crime of genocide insofar as recourse to the “general rule of interpretation” and the “supplementary means of interpretation” under the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties is concerned.

"Formerly known as the International Citation Manual"--p. xv.

An analysis of the UN human rights treaty bodies, their methods of interpretation, their effectiveness and issues of legitimacy.

The Universal Periodic Review is an intriguing and ambitious development in human rights monitoring which breaks new ground by engaging all 193 members of the United Nations. This book provides the first sustained analysis of the Review and explains how the Review functions within the architecture of the United Nations. It draws on socio-legal scholarship and the insights of human rights practitioners with direct experience of the Review in order to consider its regulatory power and its capacity to influence the behaviour of states. It also highlights the significance of the embodied features of the Review, with its cyclical and intricately managed interactive dialogues. Additionally, it discusses the rituals associated with the Review, examines the tendency of the Review towards hollow ritualism (which undermines its aspiration to address human rights violations comprehensively) and suggests how this ritualism might be overcome.