The United Nations Human Rights Council A mechanism for weakening or strengthening control procedures?

The main function of the Human Rights Council is to contribute to the promotion and the progressive development of the international human rights law, by ensuring "universality, objectivity and not-selectivity in the consideration of human rights issues, and the elimination of double standards and policization(2)". With this intention, the Council will proceed with a new mechanism, the Universal Periodic Review Mechanism(3) (UPR), ensuring the respect by the States of their obligations as well as their commitment to the protection of human rights. To undertake a reflexive study on some institutional and normative aspects of the Council is necessary in order to evaluate its real capacity to assume its broad mandate of promotion and protection of the human rights in an effective manner and to set the attitude of the States with regard to the institutional mechanisms of protection of human rights.