In recent years, the human rights community witnessed increasingly serious political difficulties in the work of the UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR), which seem to question the results of the 1993 UN Vienna conference and may lead to a setback for human rights as a whole. Forum Human Rights and the German Institute for Human Rights felt the urgent need to discuss the future work of CHR together with a number of experts who have been following developments at the Commission for several years. On October 20th and 21st 2003, they conducted in Berlin a public panel discussion and a workshop with the theme “Human rights on the defensive? The future of the Commission on Human Rights in the context of United Nations human rights protection”. This document presents a summary of the discussions and contributions of experts who attended the consultation.
