What takes place during the monitoring cycles of UN treaty bodies, and what impact do these cycles have both locally and globally? Movement in the Rights Direction explores these questions through the lens of the UN Human Rights Committee, the treaty body responsible for overseeing state compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), often considered the UN’s most authoritative and lawlike human rights monitoring mechanism.

Drawing on extensive multi-sited ethnographic practices, along with thorough documentary analysis and interviews, Miia Halme-Tuomisaari delves into the Committee’s monitoring cycles from the perspectives of Committee members, UN Secretariat staff, state delegates, and NGOs. Written in an accessible, jargon-free style and based on embedded fieldwork, the book examines the continuous movement inherent in UN treaty body operations as embodying the forward-looking progressiveness inherent in human rights ideology. This movement, in turn, receives its momentum from the hope and belief that human rights will inculcate societal change, simultaneously legitimizing action taken today even when no direct consequences are visible.

Halme-Tuomisaari further illustrates how, against common expectations, this movement strengthens rather than curtails state authority over its geography. This casts the Human Rights Committee’s operations as a state-building exercise that continues the civilizing mission of international law toward a world order structured around human rights and the rule of law. Her book is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and students interested in human rights, the anthropology of international organizations, and international law.

ABOUT THE Author

Miia Halme-Tuomisaari is Associate Professor in Human Rights Studies at Lund University. An anthropologist trained in critical international law, her work engages with the post-World War II human rights phenomenon and the international order, contributing to debates in the anthropology of international organizations, law, bureaucracy, documents and expertise. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the UN Human Rights Committee, within human rights expert networks, CSOs and the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is also a specialist in the history of human rights, having carried out archival research on lobbying efforts for the UDHR in the 1940s. Throughout her career, she has worked to increase the societal visibility of scholarship and to develop innovative new publication formats, including co-founding the online publication allegralaboratory.net. She is currently Vice-Chair of TUTKAS, the society of Finnish MPs and researchers affiliated with the Finnish Parliament. She has previously held research positions at the University of Helsinki, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies, and has delivered visiting lectures and invited talks at numerous universities across Europe. She has published widely in leading international journals. Her books include Human Rights in Action: Learning Expert Knowledge (Brill 2010), Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights (CUP 2015, co-ed with Pamela Slotte), and Movement in the Rights Direction: An Ethnography of the UN Human Rights Committee (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). She is currently finalizing the monograph Looping for Human Right: An Ethnographic Theory of Expansion, utilizing LGBTIQ+ as its case study.