 Hello everyone, I am Ethan Hizak-Shin of the Transitional Justice Working Group and I will be talking about the International Human Rights System today. When people first hear about the International Human Rights System, people go like, oh, that must be such a difficult thing that only lawyers can do or people with some kind of academic background can do. Well, that is not actually the case and the whole point of having the existence of this kind of UN Human Rights System is actually to help NGOs or activists bring further their advocacy in terms of human rights. So the goal of my talk today is to familiarize yourselves with the UN Human Rights System and to learn how to actually utilize it and feel the human rights work that you actually carry out. So first of all, why talk about the UN Human Rights System? Obviously, if you feel, if you experience human rights violations, the first three courts that you will find will usually be in the domestic courts. You can sue the government or the other public authorities before the district court appeals court, end up in the Supreme Court or even the constitutional court. If the courts find you find the violations and ruin your favor and the order remedies, obviously it will resolve the issue right there. Unfortunately, in many cases that is not necessarily the case, especially for example if you are a member of an ethnic or religious minority in a society where discrimination is rampant. It will be very difficult for you to find justice even before in a court of law. In such cases, one way to find human, to realize human rights would be to appeal your case to the UN Human Rights System. The UN Human Rights bodies usually refer to universal human rights norms and they also carry the weight or the gravity of the UN, which is the most well-known international organization in the world. Unfortunately, the UN human rights experts are not experts of the local issues or the local human rights conditions and this crucial information gap needs to be filled by the local civil society or activists or advocates. Now you might wonder if the UN is the only available international human rights mechanism. If you are actually living in Europe or Latin America or Africa, there are actually regional human rights bodies as well. For example, the European Court of Human Rights, the International Court of Human Rights and the African Court of Human and People's Rights serve the peoples in those three continents. Unfortunately, in the case of South Korea or in the broader Asia-Pacific region, there are no regional human rights mechanisms in place. And because of the political situation in the continent, one is not exactly expected to be created in the near future, which basically leaves you only with the UN human rights system as a viable option. So let's look at the brief history of the UN human rights system, which goes back to the adoption of the Charter of the United Nations in 1945 at the end of World War II. The UN Charter was the first international treaty that actually mentioned human rights in its text. Its provisions obliged the member states to respect and observe human rights without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion. The Charter itself actually does not contain substantive rights or obligations that the member states must observe. But in 1948, three years after the creation of the United Nations, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which lists a number of human rights that all human beings enjoy by virtue of being members of humanity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself is not an international treaty and it does not have legally binding force. But in the next decades, the Universal Declaration or the contents, the rights contained in the Universal Declaration have been recognized as universal rights in many national jurisdictions. And also many human rights treaties, for example, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have been adopted, finding its roots in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So that's how the UN human rights system came into being since 1945. There are basically three main UN human rights mechanisms or tools available. The first is the UN human rights treaty bodies. These treaty bodies are mandated to be composed of independent human rights experts. And their mission is to ensure that the states' parties to individual human rights treaties actually observe the obligations contained in those human rights treaties. So the member states' parties have the obligation to submit periodic reports, basically progress reports on how they have been actually observing the provisions of the human rights treaties in their country. And in some cases, the individuals living in those countries can bring a case before these human rights treaty bodies claiming that the governments have violated the provisions within the human rights treaties. Second, the UN human rights council appoints what are called the UN special procedures. These are basically human rights ombudsmen on various thematic and country issues. For example, there are special rapporteurs on torture or special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings. And there are also working groups on arbitrary detention and on enforced disappearances, as well as special rapporteurs on countries with grave human rights violations. Such as Myanmar or North Korea. Lastly, the UN human rights council has what is called the universal periodic review. Under the UPR system, basically all 193 UN member states are obligated to submit their human rights situation for review every four or five years. Which is reviewed by other UN member states who come up with recommendations to improve the human rights situations in the country under review. So that's the gist of the UN human rights system. And I look forward to elaborating further on this topic in the future talks that I will give. Thank you.