Anastasia Crickley elected Vice President of the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination

Monday, February 10, 2014 - 00:00

Francisco Calitzay (Guatemala) was unanimously elected president of the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to serve a two year term. He is the first member of an indigenous group to preside over a treaty body and his election has been widely supported and acclaimed.

Anastasia Crickley, Head of Dept. Applied Social Studies Maynooth University,  Alexei Avtonomov (Russia) and Nouredine Annie (Nigeria) were elected vice-presidents and Dilis Lahiri (India) was elected as Committee Rappoteur. As five forms the Bureau of the CERD, Anastasia is the only woman on the Bureau and one of only four women on the eighteen person committee.

One hundred and seventy six countries have now ratified CERD but difficulties remain with delayed reporting and sometimes with implementation of the recommendations in the committee’s concluding observations. At this, the 84th meeting of the committee we will consider reports and receive state delegations from Honduras, Montenegro, Belgium, Poland, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg and Switzerland. I am the rapporteur for Switzerland. In addition we will hold meetings with NGOs from those countries and also hold a half day consultation with UN member states on our work. We will consider two individual complaints and a number of issues through the Early Working and Urgent Action groups.

The committee meets from 10.00-13.00 and 15.00-18.00 Mon – Fri  from Feb 3rd until Feb 21st. Bureau, Early Working and other working group meetings take place 09.00-10.00 or 14.00-15.00 as do further meetings with NGO’s and with Human Rights Commissions.