In a recent article published on Universal Rights Group, Professor Alice Edwards, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, has offered a thoughtful and provocative proposal to reform the Special Procedures system. Observing that the system faces genuine challenges — inadequate funding, growing caseloads, inconsistent State cooperation, and what she describes as “a digital wasteland of lost hope and unmet human rights grievances” — she proposes a bold solution: to dissolve both our Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), replacing them with a new consolidated working group composed of five thematic Special Rapporteurs covering related mandates.

We hold Professor Edwards in high esteem as a colleague and fellow defender of human rights, and we share many of her concerns about the system’s challenges. Yet, we would respectfully submit, her proposal undermines the very outcomes she seeks to achieve. It misunderstands the nature of the WGAD’s work and risks sacrificing individual justice on the altar of administrative efficiency. That is precisely the irreplaceable value of individual complaint mechanisms that transforms our mandates from academic exercises into lifelines for real human beings.

Professor Edwards is right that the Special Procedures system faces genuine challenges: inadequate funding, heavy caseloads, and inconsistent State engagement. These are realities we confront every day. In 2024, nearly 6 out of 10 States did not respond to our communications — a 58% silence rate that is deeply troubling. Yet it is important to clarify: State silence does not prevent us from delivering justice. Our quasi-judicial process allows us to proceed on the merits regardless of whether a government responds, and our Opinions carry legal weight that extends far beyond the moment of their adoption — they can be invoked before domestic courts, cited in diplomatic negotiations, and used to pursue remedies and reparations long after they are issued. The problem with non-response is not that it paralyzes our work; it is that it reflects a failure of States to engage constructively with the international human rights system.

The solution to these challenges is not to dismantle the specialized mechanisms that actually deliver results. It is to resource them properly and to hold States accountable for their non-engagement.

The heart of Professor Edwards’ proposal is to transfer the WGAD’s “long-standing and highly-respected communications procedure” to a new working group composed of five Special Rapporteurs covering related thematic areas. The composition would shift from geographic representation to “subject-matter expertise” — a departure from the established UN principle that bodies of this nature should reflect equitable geographical distribution to ensure legitimacy and representativity.

This, we respectfully submit, fundamentally misunderstands what the WGAD does.

The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is not simply another communications mechanism. It is the only UN non-treaty-based procedure in the UN human-rights system with an explicitly quasi-judicial mandate to consider individual cases — rendering authoritative factual findings and legal determinations on whether detention is arbitrary under international law. Our Opinions are not advisory letters or thematic observations. They are reasoned legal judgments applying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and other international standards to specific facts concerning individuals deprived of their liberty.   Moreover, the Working Group is the only mechanism within the United Nations human rights system that may engage directly with victims without requiring them to exhaust domestic remedies. This distinctive feature is not incidental — it is essential. It enables individuals to bring their cases promptly, ensuring timely access to an international forum and, where warranted, swift recommendations for redress. When liberty is at stake, such immediacy can be the difference between prolonged suffering and timely relief.

This quasi-judicial function requires:

  • Collective deliberation: Five experts from different regions and legal traditions examining each case together, ensuring that determinations reflect diverse perspectives and withstand scrutiny across legal systems.
  • Specialized expertise in detention law: The jurisprudence on arbitrary detention is vast and technical — covering categories from detention lacking legal basis, to detention for exercising fundamental rights, to violations of fair trial guarantees, to discrimination, to indefinite detention of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. This body of law has developed over three decades and thousands of Opinions.
  • Procedural rigor: Our adversarial process — presenting allegations, inviting State responses, weighing evidence, rendering reasoned determinations — mirrors judicial proceedings. It cannot be conducted as a side function of mandate-holders already overwhelmed by their own thematic responsibilities.
  • Institutional memory and consistency: The coherence of legal determinations across cases and over time is the foundation of any quasi-judicial body’s legitimacy — and, crucially, of its practical effectiveness. When a detainee’s lawyer in Bangkok can cite WGAD jurisprudence that aligns with how we ruled in a similar case from Minsk or Kinshasa or Caracas or Manama, our Opinions become tools that domestic advocates can actually use. When the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and constitutional and supreme courts across the globe draw on our reasoning, it reinforces the universal standards that protect individuals everywhere. Our jurisprudence represents an irreplaceable institutional asset.

Five Special Rapporteurs — each carrying his or her own substantial mandates, country visits, thematic reports, press releases and communications — cannot replicate this function by meeting periodically as a consolidated working group. The mathematics alone make this clear.

Speaking about the mathematics of individual justice, in 2025, the Working Group adopted 78 Opinions concerning 210 persons in 38 countries. Each Opinion requires detailed analysis of domestic law, evaluation of evidence, application of our established jurisprudence, and collective deliberation among five experts.

Professor Edwards’ proposal would have five Special Rapporteurs — already stretched beyond capacity by their existing mandates — somehow absorb this caseload while simultaneously conducting their own country visits, writing their own thematic reports, and managing their own communications.

The proposal claims it would “maximise the number of cases that can be pursued.” The opposite is true. It would inevitably mean fewer cases examined, less rigorous analysis, and longer delays — precisely the problems Professor Edwards seeks to solve.

Behind every statistic is a human being. In 2024, 45 individuals walked free from arbitrary detention following our Opinions. From 16 releases in 2021 to 45 in 2024 — this trajectory tells a story of growing impact, of a mandate that has found its strength.

When the Working Group commemorated its 100th session in Geneva, we heard directly from former detainees. They told us that receiving our Opinion while still behind bars was often their first — and sometimes only — recognition that their suffering was seen by the international community. In regions where regional human rights mechanisms are absent or weak, we serve as the sole international voice affirming that someone’s detention violates international law.

One former detainee described our work as “the only door that was open when all others had closed”.

This is not work that can be absorbed as an ancillary function of a consolidated working group. It is specialized, demanding, and irreplaceable. “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?”, Eleanor Roosevelt asked. “In small places, close to home… the world of the individual person”.

The Working Group exists to reach those small places — the cells where individuals wait, often in silence, for someone to affirm that their detention is unlawful and their suffering seen. This is not work that can be folded into a larger portfolio or performed in the gaps between other duties. It is a vocation. Lives restored to freedom testify to what such dedication makes possible.

Professor Edwards further suggests that the new consolidated working group would shift from geographic representation to subject-matter expertise. But the WGAD’s geographic composition is not an accident of history — it is essential to its legitimacy and effectiveness.

When experts from different legal traditions — common law and civil law, from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe — deliberate together, the resulting jurisprudence carries authority precisely because it reflects a genuine synthesis of diverse perspectives. States are more likely to accept determinations rendered by a body that includes experts who understand their legal systems and regional contexts.

A working group composed exclusively of five thematic Special Rapporteurs — however expert in their fields — would lose this geographic legitimacy, potentially undermining State cooperation further rather than improving it.

Professor Edwards frames her proposal as achieving efficiency: “maximising cases”, “reducing duplication”, “pooling resources”. But efficiency is not the measure of a human rights mechanism. Justice is the measure.

The Working Group exists because arbitrary detention is a distinctive violation requiring specialized attention. It is not merely torture, though torture often accompanies it. It is not merely enforced disappearance, though the boundaries blur. It is not merely an unfair trial, though gross procedural violations are all too common. Arbitrary detention is its own category of abuse — the deprivation of liberty without legal basis or due process — and it requires its own dedicated mechanism to address it.

When a journalist is imprisoned for her reporting, when an activist is detained for peaceful protest, when a migrant is held indefinitely without judicial review, when a political opponent is jailed on fabricated charges, when a member of an ethnic or religious minority is locked up simply for being who he or she is — these individuals need more than sympathy. They need a mechanism that takes their specific situation seriously, applies the legal standards governing detention with rigour, and renders a determination that carries weight.

That mechanism is the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention — in effect, a universal habeas corpus procedure and, for many, the only international remedy available when domestic courts have failed and no regional human rights court exists. For over three decades, we have answered the call. We typically render Opinions within months — more swiftly than most international bodies, because liberty cannot wait. We have built an authoritative body of jurisprudence cited by courts around the world. We have secured the release of hundreds of individuals. It works.

We welcome continued dialogue with Professor Edwards and all colleagues on how to improve the Special Procedures system. The problems she identifies are real, and they demand attention.

But the answer is not to dissolve specialized mechanisms that deliver concrete results for real human beings. It is to strengthen them — with adequate funding, with mechanisms to ensure State cooperation, and with recognition that quasi-judicial functions cannot be performed as side activities of already-overburdened mandate-holders.

As Elie Wiesel reminded us: “Action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all”. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is action — with opinions and releases. This is not a mechanism that needs to be rationalized out of existence. It is a mechanism that needs to be supported so it can do even more.

The world is watching. History will judge the UN human rights system not by the pragmatism of its organizational design, but by the prison doors it opens for those who should never have been there.