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The purpose of this article is to give attention to the concept of racist hate speech and particularly to the fact of its complexity and inseparability from a wider spectrum of hatred. Using the methodology of intersectionality, this article encourages the CERD Committee's continued but cautious engagement in relation to racist hate speech. This article is a lightly modified version of a paper the author was invited to present at the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination's day of thematic discussion on Racist Hate Speech, held during CERD's eighty-first session on 28 August 2012 in Geneva.

The purpose of this article is to give attention to the concept of racist hate speech and particularly to the fact of its complexity and inseparability from a wider spectrum of hatred. Using the methodology of intersectionality, this article encourages the CERD Committee's continued but cautious engagement in relation to racist hate speech. This article is a lightly modified version of the article that the author was invited to present at the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination's day of thematic discussion on Racist Hate Speech, held during CERD's eighty-first session on Aug 28, 2012 in Geneva. Adapted from the source document.

The policy decision to replace the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights (CHR) with a new UN Human Rights Council (HRC) was taken by governments at the September 2005 World Summit and adopted as a General Assembly (GA) resolution on 15 March 2006.1 This brought an end to the CHR's chequered 60-year history.2 The membership, structure and aims and procedures of the new HRC underwent months of intense discussion between States in the lead up to the adoption of this resolution. The purpose of this note is to explain the various proposals explored in the shaping of the HRC and the extent to which the resolution bringing it into being responded to weaknesses perceived in the CHR. Since almost every reference to the CHR came to be prefaced by the term 'discredited' since 2005, the question is to what extent the reasons for the loss of legitimacy in the CHR were actually addressed in the crafting of the new HRC.

Decision-making by the UN Commission on Human Rights has become little more than a highly politicized and polarized game, almost totally negligent of the legal nature of the human rights instruments that uphold the standards by which Commission decision-making should be guided. The 60th session of the Commission included some significant discussions and decisions regarding country and thematic mandates. The purpose of this article is to present the key setbacks and developments during the session and to analyze how these have impacted on the overall stature of the Commission within the international human rights system. This paper discusses the Commission's country-specific resolutions in detail, and outlines several thematic mechanisms in the subsequent section. Overall, the session was notable more for setbacks rather than developments in the field of human rights. Instead of making strong condemnations against human rights violators such as the Sudan, the Commission was directed by political interests, protecting some of the worst violators of human rights from exposure and shaming. Though the stature of the Commission has declined considerably in recent years, it still maintains the potential of playing a strong role in the defense, promotion and monitoring of human rights.