Herding Cats and Sheep: Assessing State and Regional ... - UPR Info

significant and require substantive actions on the part of the SuR, others may not be veryimportant, given the context in which they are being made.Responses to Recommendations (H)The four types of responses by the SuR include Accepted, Rejected, No Response, andGeneral Response. While the first three are self-explanatory, general responses are mainlycomments on the subject matter recommendation, without clearly stating acceptance or rejection.Further research on this issue is needed, but many of these responses appear to be de factorejections of recommendations without so stating officially.Typology of Issues (I)This category provides recommendations by issue raised. These include, inter alia,women’s rights, children, torture, justice, migrants, death penalty, and freedom of the press.The information presented below represents aggregated data from the first five sessions.We must be circumspect in comparing data from session to session, as there are likely to bevariations in the regime types and level of commitment to human rights between SuRs in thedifferent sessions. For example, while this may not have been pre-ordained, in fact the HRCexamined countries with less controversial human rights records in the first session when theUPR procedure was new. It had the practical effect, then, of serving, in a sense, as a “shakedowncruise”. Beginning in the second session, by contrast, the HRC began to consider some ofthe thornier country contexts. As a future research agenda it will be useful to control for thesedifferences in more detail through the use of human rights democratization indices such as10