UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is the principal UN entity mandated to promote and protect all human rights established under the UN Charter and international human rights law. It was created by General Assembly resolution 48/141 on 20 December 1993, following a recommendation of the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights held earlier that year.

OHCHR is headquartered at the Palais Wilson in Geneva, with a liaison office in New York and a network of regional and country offices. It is headed by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who holds the rank of Under-Secretary-General and is appointed by the UN Secretary-General with the approval of the General Assembly for a four-year term, renewable once.

Core functions of OHCHR include:

• Providing substantive and secretariat support to the Human Rights Council, the Universal Periodic Review, the Special Procedures (special rapporteurs, independent experts, working groups), and the ten UN human rights treaty bodies.
• Conducting human rights monitoring, fact-finding and investigations, including through commissions of inquiry mandated by the Human Rights Council.
• Offering technical cooperation and capacity-building to states, national human rights institutions, and civil society.
• Mainstreaming human rights across the UN system, including in peace operations and the work of UN Country Teams.
• Publishing thematic and country reports and managing the OHCHR human rights treaty database.

OHCHR is funded by a combination of the UN regular budget and voluntary contributions, with voluntary funding typically accounting for the majority of its resources. It works closely with, but is institutionally distinct from, the intergovernmental Human Rights Council (created by GA resolution 60/251 in 2006), which OHCHR services as its secretariat.

Past High Commissioners include José Ayala-Lasso, Mary Robinson, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Louise Arbour, Navi Pillay, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, and Michelle Bachelet. Volker Türk of Austria took office as High Commissioner in October 2022.