Movement in the Rights Direction

Pioneering ethnography of the UN Human Rights Committee that is essential for scholars, students, and practitioners

What takes place during the monitoring cycles of UN treaty bodies, and what impact do these cycles have both locally and globally? Movement in the Rights Direction explores these questions through the lens of the UN Human Rights Committee, the treaty body responsible for overseeing state compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), often considered the UN’s most authoritative and lawlike human rights monitoring mechanism.

Drawing on extensive multi-sited ethnographic practices, along with thorough documentary analysis and interviews, Miia Halme-Tuomisaari delves into the Committee’s monitoring cycles from the perspectives of Committee members, UN Secretariat staff, state delegates, and NGOs. Written in an accessible, jargon-free style and based on embedded fieldwork, the book examines the continuous movement inherent in UN treaty body operations as embodying the forward-looking progressiveness inherent in human rights ideology. This movement, in turn, receives its momentum from the hope and belief that human rights will inculcate societal change, simultaneously legitimizing action taken today even when no direct consequences are visible.

Halme-Tuomisaari further illustrates how, against common expectations, this movement strengthens rather than curtails state authority over its geography. This casts the Human Rights Committee’s operations as a state-building exercise that continues the civilizing mission of international law toward a world order structured around human rights and the rule of law. Her book is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and students interested in human rights, the anthropology of international organizations, and international law.