The United Nations Creates a Working Group on Arbitrary Detention

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which met from January 28 to March 8, 1991, in the shadow of the gulf war, nevertheless completed what many observers considered its most productive session in recent history. The Commission took action on a record of nineteen country situations—creating new rapporteurs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait—began plans for a 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and set up an intersessional working group to complete a draft declaration on disappearances. The most important long-term accomplishment of the Commission, however, was the creation of a five-member working group to investigate cases of arbitrary detention throughout the world.