Context
In 2023, our Committee launched the update process of the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) Charter-Agenda for Human Rights. In the words of Emilia Saiz, UCLG Secretary General, this process is the muscle of UCLG's Policy Council ‘Right to the City: Reclaiming the Commons’, which aims to support the defence of local public services with human rights at the centre. To this end, our Committee has set up a Steering Board (SB), made up of around twenty members, including representatives of local and regional authorities and the Committee's partner international experts from different regions of the world.
The SB met four times in 2023 (in May, June, September and December) to define a new structure for the Charter rights. The results of this first phase of the process were presented to elected representatives and members of the Global Campaign ‘10, 100, 1000 Human Rights Cities and Territories by 2030’ at an online meeting in September 2023.
In December, the SB validated the final version of the rights structure of the new version of the Charter-Agenda, which includes six major groups of rights comprising a total of 33 sub-categories of rights.
The second phase
The second phase in 2024 aims to define the content of the rights included in the new structure.
To do this, our Committee organised a meeting in March at which each member of the SB chose to join one or more of the six rights groups to work on defining the content. The selection was made based on the local expertise that each member could bring to the specific theme of the rights groups. One of the highlights of this meeting was the importance of paying attention to local considerations regarding the terms and concepts that define content. Similarly, members called for the conversation to be broadened to include what local and regional authorities need from national governments to realise human rights at the local level.
For their part, six SB members took the lead in each group to coordinate and consolidate the contributions and translate them into recommendations. The leaders will also act as contact points at UCLG events and at the international level.
The working groups are expected to submit their first drafts by the end of September. Once received, the CSIPDHR Secretariat will examine and harmonise the content of the working groups' drafts and include them in a single document. This document will attempt to define common standards and general principles applicable at the local level for translating human rights into policies and will integrate the new aspirations emerging from the local level into the global debates on the new generation of human rights.
The draft of the new version of the Human Rights Charter-Agenda will be presented and discussed with the elected representatives of the SB cities and the member cities of the Global Campaign ‘10, 100, 1000 Human Rights Cities and Territories by 2030’, as well as with the co-presidency of the CSIPDHR.
In addition, at the request of the SB members to include contributions from partners with expertise in human rights, it was proposed to hold an exchange with various UN special rapporteurs and representatives of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on the new version of the document. The objectives are to better integrate specific aspects of rights into the new Charter-Agenda and to promote the document within high-level international human rights frameworks.
This dialogue, as well as the results of this second phase, will be shared at the meeting organised by UCLG, the Barcelona City Council and UNESCO as part of the World Human Rights Day, to be held on 10 December 2024.