A Gathering of Wise Statesmen: The Universal Periodic Review and Canada’s human rights record
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is recent innovation of the principal United Nations human rights body, the Human Rights Council. It provides for the regular review of the human rights records of each member state of the United Nations approximately once every four years. In this paper, I argue that the UPR is not an effective mechanism for the promotion and protection of human rights in Canada. Through the lens of the rights of migrant workers as well as refugees and asylum seekers, I show that the UPR has little concrete influence on Canadian policy. I argue that this is due, in part, to flaws in the UPR mechanism itself, which privileges certain approaches to and conceptions of rights over others. Additionally, I argue that UPR’s lack of effect is partly due to Canada’s human rights “implementation gap”: a lack of effective procedures to ensure domestic implementation of its international human rights commitments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".