The United Nations Treaty Bodies and Universal Periodic Review: Advancing Human Rights by Preventing Politicization?

The absence of politicization is widely considered an essential feature in ensuring the credibility of international organizations concerned with human rights monitoring. Nonetheless, hardly any empirical research has been conducted to systematically assess its presence and identify its consequences. Therefore, this article investigates the extent to which the state reporting process of the Treaty Bodies and the Universal Periodic Review are perceived to be politicized, and what consequences politicization has on their credibility. It claims that whereas politicization carries exclusively negative consequences in the Treaty Bodies, it has some unexpected positive consequences in the case of the Universal Periodic Review.