The United Nations Commission on Human Rights

John Pace is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales and Adjunct at the Sydney Centre for International Law at the University of Sydney. His UN career (1966-1999) coincided with the introduction of special procedures and the first human rights investigations. As human rights activities evolved, John was given responsibility for other, new, activities including the technical cooperation and the external relations programmes. As part of these responsibilities, the author travelled to many countries and witnessed first-hand the effect of human rights problems and the ongoing need to address them. His extensive field experience was balanced by his responsibility for the Commission on Human Rights as its Secretary (1978-1994), and as Coordinator of the World Conference on Human Rights which took place in Vienna in 1993. The author has continued to build his human rights experiences in the last twenty years, undertaking various responsibilities such as in Indonesia, Iraq, and Liberia among many others. John's current priorities include human rights of women, migrant workers and asylum seekers, administration of justice issues, and human rights in countering terrorism.