Report shows where abortion stands as a global ‘human rights’ priority

(Washington, DC — C-Fam) The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a process whereby individual governments at the UN give each other recommendations on how to improve their human rights records. C-Fam’s human rights database offers a window into governments’ human rights priorities on social issues, both in terms of what they say and what they do not say.

Recommendations made in the UPR are brief and the recipient government responds briefly; either “supported” or “noted.” Across the three completed and fourth ongoing cycles of the UPR, tens of thousands of recommendations have been exchanged between governments, providing an opportunity for deeper analysis into which issues receive the most attention (the number of recommendations made on that subject) and the level of agreement across governments (whether they are “supported” when received).

And here is a surprising fact revealed in C-Fam’s database[:] relatively few UPR recommendations explicitly mention abortion or sexual orientation/gender identity (SOGI). Abortion appears in fewer than 1 percent of recommendations, while SOGI appears in fewer than 4%. Across the first three UPR cycles, about 73% of recommendations were supported, but for abortion and SOGI recommendations, the figure drops by roughly half.

Perhaps the most telling finding is what’s not being said. More than half of the world’s nearly two hundred governments did not make a single recommendation on abortion or SOGI in each UPR cycle. In the case of abortion, at least 160 out of 193 governments remained silent on the issue.

Meanwhile, a few governments have been very outspoken, with Iceland as the extreme outlier on both issues.  In the third UPR cycle, Iceland pressured other governments on abortion 48 times, accounting for 21% of all abortion pressure in that cycle.  In the ongoing fourth cycle, Iceland has already pressured governments 71 times, which is 28% of the total.  Iceland also leads the world in SOGI pressure…

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Editor’s Note: Rebecca Oas, Ph. D., writes for C-Fam. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-Fam (Center for Family & Human Rights), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (https://c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.