The UN Human Rights Committee concluded the first reading of the draft General Comment no. 37 on Article 21, ICCPR (Right to peaceful assembly) during its 127th session in October-November 2019. The revised draft General Comment is available here. Prior to the forthcoming reading and review of the draft General Comment between 2-27 March 2020, the Human Rights Committee invited all stakeholders, including Member States, UN and regional bodies, organisations or specialised agencies, national human rights institutions, civil society, and academia, to send their comments on the new draft to [email protected] by the 20 February 2020 deadline.
To read ECNL's comments on the draft General Comment focusing on the purpose of the right and the space in which the right can be exercised (including public vs. private ad online vs. offline), click here.
ECNL is pleased to continue supporting the drafting process of the General Comment. To this end, in December 2019 we convened an expert workshop together with University of East Anglia and the Centre of Governance & Human Rights (CGHR) at the University of Cambridge focusing on the potential for exercising the right to freedom of assembly online so that the premises for online assemblies’ effective and meaningful protection are laid out. In addition, we also convened a regional consultation in Europe in September 2019 for national stakeholders from France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Ireland, Bosnia, Croatia, Belarus, Russia, Moldova and Azerbaijan to give feedback on freedom of assembly in their countries to fill in the gaps in the draft document and share their direct experience with the Human Rights Committee.
Furthermore, ECNL also seeks to coordinate between international CSOs, regarding responses to the requests of Human Rights Committee around the General Comment, so that our interventions and arguments are mutually helpful and complementary. Finally, to help the drafting process further and provide the Human Rights Committee with a resource, we also collected UN and regional materials on freedom of assembly.
Our Freedom of Assembly Repository includes views, concluding observations, and lists of issues from the UN Human Rights Committee and other UN treaty bodies, along with regional standards, recommendations and jurisprudence.
For a compilation of key principles in the Committee’s freedom of assembly jurisprudence, see the in-depth report below, supported by ECNL: dr. Michael Hamilton: Towards a General Comment on Article 21
For more information on this topic, please see our earlier news items: