Ghana’s human rights record was last reviewed by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in October 2012. The outcome document of the review, that is, the Working Group (WG) report, was adopted by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in April, 2013. Ghana received 152 recommendations from 63 states out of which she accepted 123 recommendations. The country is now set to be reviewed for the third time in November, 2017.
In preparation for the third cycle review, LRC together with other CSOs came together in this broad based coalition to prepare and develop over 10 out of 24 thematic reports which were submitted to the UN on 30th March, 2017. This marked an increase in the number of reports that were submitted, especially by indigenous national CSOs. Ghana CSOs are now required to undertake coordinated and sustained lobbying among the various Recommending States and to achieve the same, the CSOs among other things have developed Factsheets that summarize the aforesaid report; isolate the key issues; update the current state of affairs; provide statistics; identify the challenges; and propose recommendations.
The objectives of the meeting was to: Train both CSOs and media on the UN human rights Treaty bodies, monitoring mechanisms and in particular, the UPR process; Share good practices on lobbying and advocacy within the UPR and how best to utilize the process to facilitate the development and finalization of advocacy tools; Provide a forum for multi-stakeholder dialogue between members of the Diplomatic Corp (as the Recommending States) and CSOs; and Prepare CSOs to participate in the Geneva Pre-session.
This 2 Day UPR In-Country Pre-session was organised by POS Foundation on 6th and 7th September, 2017 at the Alisa Hotel, Accra. This was done in Partnership with UPR Info Africa-Kenya, Kasa Initiative and under the auspices of Ghana Human Rights NGOs Forum and the United Nations Office in Ghana with funding from DANIDA.
