The Accountability Levels of Saudi Arabia towards United Nations Mechanisms (2009-2016)

The Human Rights Council (HRC) is one of the sub-bodies of the UN General Assembly, whose duty is to point out human rights violation cases and promote the accountability of states in this regard. The UPR is the most important monitoring tools of the HRC with the aim of monitoring, promotion and protection of human rights in all states and based on dialogue and cooperation, and is based on reliable and targeted information and equal treatment of all states. With the use of this mechanism and based on an organized program, the commitment of all countries of the world be reviewed and assessed. Now to what level this process has been able to affect the accountability levels of Saudi Arabia is not something that can be clearly answered in the first place. With a review of Saudi Arabia’s performance between the first and second rounds its UPR, the accountability levels of this country towards human rights bodies of the UN can be studied. For this purpose a review of the commitment levels of this country on the basis of its accepted recommendations in the first and second round of the UPR has been scrutinized in this article. With attention to conducted researches it seems that the promotion of human rights and increasing Saudi Arabia’s accountability to human rights mechanisms, further than standardization, the international community needs to guarantee the implementation and make Saudi Arabia to be accountable in observation of human rights principles, and to show commitment level, can increase the speculation of the tool usage of these mechanisms for the purpose of the presentation of the unreal human rights picture. The establishment of universal mechanisms for the protection of human rights, overall, must deemed as a positive step and hope that what is called the “Universal Periodic Review”, can be seen as the accountability of states to international bodies.