The U.N. Human Rights Council concluded its 13th regular 
session last week, having considered a great variety of reports from the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the special procedures, and the Working Group on Universal Period Review (reports on Eritrea, the Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Norway, Albania, Cyprus, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Portugal, Bhutan, Dominica, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Brunei Darussalam, Costa Rica, Equatorial Guinea, and Ethiopia). The session was held from March 1-26 in Geneva (see the agenda and session report).
Among many other agenda items, the Council received the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention‘s report (which lists the opinions taken regarding individual communications, its recommendations regarding military tribunals, states of emergency, and habeas corpus in the context of administrative detention); a report on the possibility of drafting an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child to enable an individual communications procedure; a report on human rights violations in the wake of the coup d’etat in Honduras; the High Commissioner’s report on the issue of pregnant Palestinian women giving birth at Israeli checkpoints.
See more on universal mechanisms for human rights protection, on this blog, here.