Saudi Gazette report

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia has accepted as many as 453 human rights recommendations, either full or in part, during the past 10 years.

In a report published on its twitter account on Wednesday, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) detailed the Kingdom’s cooperation with the UN mechanisms.

It noted that in 2009, the Council provided 70 recommendations, of which 52 were accepted by the Kingdom. In 2013, it accepted 151 out of 225 recommendations. In 2018, the number of accepted recommendations was 182 out of a total of 258 recommendations.

Four Special Rapporteurs visited the Kingdom as part of its cooperation with the UN mechanism. These included Special Rapporteur on independence of judiciary and lawyers in Oct. 2002; Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences in Feb.2008; the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, and Human Rights in January 2017; and Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism in May 2017.

The Council affirmed that the Kingdom has strengthened national capacities in the field of human rights with a memorandum of understanding in 2012 with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and more than 47 activities were carried out under this memorandum.

In a qualitative victory for the Saudi human rights body, the Council announced last November the adoption of Saudi Arabia’s third Universal Periodic Review.

The Kingdom had fulfilled all the obligations to which it had become a party, providing all its international reports, the most recent of which was the Universal Periodic Review before the Human Rights Council, thus being one of the 36 countries that had committed themselves to the total of 197 member countries.