Apparent Conflicts Of Interests Between Certain NGOs And Judges Of The European Court Of Human Rights. Surely, One Thinks, This Cannot Be Right. Can It ?

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THE EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR LAW AND JUSTICE

This Article is re-printed from 2022.

After having highlighted the conflicts of interest between certain NGOs and judges of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) publishes a new report (91 pages) analysing the functioning and financing of the U.N. Special Procedures Human Rights experts.

It reveals the insufficiency and opacity of their funding and exposes precisely the methods implemented by some private funders to influence these experts.

It also presents recommendations to restore the conditions that would better ensure their independence.

In its previous report, the ECLJ demonstrated the existence of conflicts of interest involving ECHR judges.

The accuracy of this first report has since been recognised by the ambassadors of the Council of Europe.[1] This time, the ECLJ has devoted several months to meticulously studying the public financing declarations of the UN’s experts.

The ECLJ was also able to conduct interviews with 28 of these UN Special Procedures experts, and what emerged was revealing.

The main conclusion of this report is that private foundations directly finance U.N. experts to write reports that align with these private foundations’ agendas.

These reports are then promoted as independent recommendations from the U.N., and used by governments and international courts to support or justify their decisions.

This is in flagrant contradiction with the code of conduct for experts and the resolutions of the Human Rights Council.

Experts should be independent not only from States, but also from private foundations that seek to align the experts’ agendas with their own.