United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)

Palais Wilson building OHCHR headquarters

Overview

MOPAN released its most recent assessment of OHCHR in 2019.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights was first established by the UN General Assembly in 1993. The High Commissioner is the principal human rights official of the UN. S/he is accountable to the Secretary General and the General Assembly and is responsible for all activities of OHCHR as well as its administration. The High Commissioner is mandated to promote and protect the enjoyment and full realisation, by all people, of all rights established in the Charter of the United Nations and in international human rights laws and treaties. This mandate is provided by the General Assembly in Resolution 48/141, the Charter of the United Nations and subsequent resolutions of policy-making bodies. It is guided in its work by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent human rights instruments, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights and the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document. In recognition of the pivotal performance of the mandate of OHCHR, the High Commissioner became a member of all four executive committees established by the Secretary-General.

OHCHR's activities include providing technical assistance to national governments so that they are able to fulfil their human rights obligations, assisting the creation and functioning of National Human Rights Institutions and supporting civil society actors; human rights standard-setting and monitoring through its role as secretariat of the Human Rights Council, the work of independent experts known as Special Procedures; providing legal advice and secretariat support to the main human rights treaty bodies; developing a set of indicators of adherence to human rights; and speaking out objectively in the face of human rights violations. The Office also leads efforts to integrate a human rights-based approach within all work carried out by UN agencies.

Performance rating summary

OHCHR organisational performance wheel — Organisational performance

Key findings

OHCHR has made important strides in further strengthening its strategic leadership and management and fostering an inclusive corporate identity. Developed under the guidance of OHCHR’s leadership, the OHCHR Management Plans demonstrate (i) a clear and coherent vision and roadmap for the organisation; (ii) how it positions itself vis-à-vis other stakeholders within the UN system and beyond, in particular the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; (iii) the results to which the Office intends to contribute; and (iv) the improvements needed to bolster its own effectiveness.
OHCHR’s longstanding commitment to gender equality and the empowerment of women is widely acknowledged and highly regarded. The Office has worked hard to develop and improve tools to promote gender equality in all areas of its work. It advocated successfully for including Goal 5 in the 2030 Agenda and has identified gender equality as a main area of its future work across all its strategic pillars.
OHCHR has made commendable progress in its operational and results-based management culture and systems. It has a common framework for planning and reporting its activities that has reinforced the coherence among mandated responsibilities, priorities and actions at all levels. Corporate-level strategies are based on a sound results-based management focus and logic, and they guide lower-level planning and monitoring. OHCHR’s bespoke monitoring systems are of a high quality and inform management decisions. This has enabled the Office to achieve results and to use scarce human and financial resources more efficiently.

OHCHR’s organisational architecture is not yet fully fit for purpose. This is especially visible in the structural lack of resources from the UN’s regular budget, both for mandated activities at headquarters level and (especially) in the field. Its position within the UN Secretariat also limits its agility and autonomy to deal with organisational bottlenecks and other challenges. This affects OHCHR’s ability to respond to the growing demand from its various stakeholders for support in achieving compliance with international obligations. It also affects the extent to which OHCHR can contribute to mainstreaming a human rights-based approach in UN system-wide policies and strategies and beyond.
Partnerships are inherent to OHCHR, but it does not yet have a corporate strategy laying out why, how and which partnerships are important for the present and the future. OHCHR’s efforts to expand its donor base have only been partly successful. The Office is vulnerable to unpredictable, earmarked funding, and the risk of noncontinuation by one or more large donors is acknowledged by the organisation. OHCHR needs a more strategic and innovative perspective on the nexus between partnerships, external communications and fundraising.
OHCHR’S human resource management is insufficiently aligned with the needs and requirements of the Office. Besides the sometimes inefficient rules, regulations, systems and processes of the UN Secretariat that OHCHR has to follow, the Office itself has not kept pace with growing demands in areas such as recruitment, staff mobility, talent management, staff development, performance management and diversity. The Office needs to help staff develop their competencies, skills and knowledge to deliver on the OHCHR Management Plan’s priorities.
Although OHCHR’s evaluation function is showing signs of improvement, it is under-resourced, both in terms of staff and funds. The Office lacks an “evaluation culture”; while the number of centralised and decentralised evaluations is increasing, it remains low. Consequently, there are very few independent external evaluations, especially at the global level, of OHCHR’s results performance, in areas like advocacy, or of the standard setting, monitoring and reporting activities carried out in the context of the UN human rights mechanisms. This makes it more difficult to communicate, internally and externally, how the organisation is advancing in the eyes of independent experts.

2017-18 MOPAN assessment of OHCHR

Assessment

OHCHR

OHCHR 2017-18 Assessment Report

25 April 2019
OHCHR

Performance at a glance

OHCHR 2017-18 Performance at a Glance

25 April 2019
Management response

OHCHR

OHCHR 2017-18 Management Response

30 September 2019

Institutional leads

Finland

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)

Overview

Performance rating summary

Organisational performance

Results

Key findings

2017-18 MOPAN assessment of OHCHR

Institutional leads

Our work

Our impact

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)

Overview

Performance rating summary

Organisational performance

Results

Key findings

Areas of strength

Areas of opportunity

2017-18 MOPAN assessment of OHCHR

Institutional leads

Our work

Our impact