UN rights council to meet Friday on DR Congo violence

The UN Human Rights Council announced Tuesday it would hold an urgent session on the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which is gripped by violence.

Friday’s special session will focus on “the human rights situation in eastern DR Congo”, council spokesman Pascal Sim told reporters in Geneva.

He said the DRC requested the session on Monday.

The council is the United Nations’ top rights body and was not due to meet until late February.

Last week, the Rwandan-backed armed group M23 and Rwandan troops seized Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu — a mineral-rich region in the DR Congo’s east that has been blighted by war for over three decades.

Fighting has stopped in the city of more than a million but clashes have spread to the neighbouring province of South Kivu, raising fears of an M23 advance to its capital Bukavu.

M23 announced a humanitarian “ceasefire” from Tuesday in the east, days before a planned crisis meeting between Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

The Human Rights Council, composed of 47 member states, holds three regular sessions a year, over a minimum of 10 weeks in total.

The next regular session is scheduled for February 24 to April 4.

The support of 16 member states — more than a third — is required to convene a special session.

The DRC is a member of the council and so far, 29 member states have backed the call, plus 22 observer states, said Sim.

He said an organisational meeting would be held on Thursday to discuss the details and format of the session, and a draft resolution was being drawn up.

Friday’s meeting will be the 37th special session since the council was founded in 2006.

The last was in May 2023 on the conflict in Sudan, and before that in November 2022 on the deteriorating rights situation in Iran, particularly with respect to women and children.