Eduardo González
Spain has been elected on Wednesday to be part of the UN Human Rights Council during the period 2025-2027, a subsidiary body of the General Assembly to which our country has already belonged on two previous occasions: between 2011 and 2013 and between 2018 and 2020.
The decision of the United Nations General Assembly, meeting in New York, “reflects Spain’s commitment to human rights, with multilateralism, with the United Nations, with tolerance and with peace” and represents “another achievement of our foreign policy that shows the weight and importance of Spain’s voice in the world,” declared the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, in a video posted on social media.
“From the Human Rights Council we are going to promote all rights, political rights and economic, social and cultural rights, we are going to protect human rights defenders in the world and we are going to advance gender equality, the rights of people with disabilities and the right to the environment,” he continued. “Spain is going to be at the centre of human rights,” he added.
Albares himself announced at the end of February in Geneva, during his participation in the high-level segment of the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council, the presentation of Spain’s candidacy, which “is based on achievements and commitments at the national level: the development of the second National Human Rights Plan, the commitment set out in the new Cooperation Law to reach 0.7 percent of gross national income as official development aid and our feminist foreign policy.”
“We are also working to approve a law for the protection of human rights, sustainability and due diligence in business activities and to promote human rights in the digital environment to develop an ethical and humanistic Artificial Intelligence,” added the minister in Geneva.
The Human Rights Council, the main multilateral body for the protection and promotion of human rights in the world, was created by the UN General Assembly in March 2006, replacing the previous Commission on Human Rights, and is based in Geneva.
The Council is a subsidiary body of the General Assembly that meets periodically throughout the year and is intergovernmental in nature. Specifically, the Council is composed of 47 United Nations States elected by the General Assembly through a direct and secret vote for a period of three years.
Membership is divided among the regional groups of the United Nations: seven for Western Europe and other groups (including the United States and Canada), six for Eastern Europe, thirteen for Africa, thirteen for Asia and eight for Latin America and the Caribbean. The mandate of each member State is three years, although it is possible to be re-elected for up to two consecutive periods.
Spain has been part of this body on two occasions: between 2011 and 2013 (it began during the PSOE government, with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, but it developed mainly under the presidency of Mariano Rajoy, of the PP) and between 2018 and 2020 (the candidacy was presented in 2017 by the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alfonso Dastis, in the Rajoy Executive, but most of the mandate took place under the government of the current president, the socialist Pedro Sánchez).
