Philip Alston

He was appointed to that post by Sergio Vieira de Mello, and has continued to advise successor High Commissioners, including Louise Arbour and Navanethem Pillay.

As Special Rapporteur, Alston visited Nigeria, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Guatemala, Lebanon, Israel, The Central African Republic, Brazil, Afghanistan, the USA, Kenya, Ecuador, and Colombia, and issued a report in each case to the relevant government and to the United Nations.

Alston's reports to the UN relating to extrajudicial executions also dealt with broad thematic issues that arose in many countries, such as witchcraft and vigilante killings, national-level commissions of inquiry dealing with unlawful killings, the problem of prisoners running prisons, the importance of witness protection programs, the problem of governmental reprisals against individuals or groups who have cooperated with a UN human rights inquiry, the need to regulate the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, shoot-to-kill policies, the relationship between human rights law and international humanitarian law, mercy killings in times of armed conflict, and the need to make military justice systems compatible with human rights.

Its goals include providing "greater prominence to the plight of those living in extreme poverty and to highlight the human rights consequences of the systematic neglect to which they are all too often subjected.

"[5] In late October 2016, Alston released a scathing report to the UN General Assembly, calling the UN's refusal to accept responsibility for the devastating 2010 Haiti cholera outbreak a "disgrace."

"[6] Alston said that the UN appeared to have been pressed by United States, the "main contributor to the UN's peacekeeping budget", to "adopt the position frequently taken by lawyers in the US that responsibility should never be accepted voluntarily, since it could complicate future litigation.

"[6] Alston explained that "this rationale is completely inapplicable to the UN", which unlike the justice system in the United States, "enjoys absolute immunity from suit in national courts and whose reputation depends almost entirely on being seen to act with integrity.

"[8] In his opening and closing statements, Alston called on advocacy groups like the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and the Haiti-based Bureau des Avocats Internationaux [fr] (BAI) to continue their work, and to keep up pressure on UN Member States.

In December 2017, Alston reported that in "a community in Butler County, Alabama he found raw sewage flowing from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.

[15] According to The Guardian, there was a surge in the cost of housing following the "tech boom for the 0.001%",[15] during which in the early 2010s, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube and startups Hulu, Demand Media, Snapchat opened offices in the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Santa Monica, Venice, and Playa del Rey.

[15] In autumn 2018, Alston did a two-week fact-finding tour of the United Kingdom where he met with people living in poverty, spoke with civil society front line workers, work coaches, and local, devolved and UK governments, "and visited community organisations, social housing, a Jobcentre, a food bank, an advice center, a library, and a primary school.

In a statement released on 16 November he said for almost half of the nation's children to be poor today is "not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one", the government's approach to poverty is not guided by economics but "a commitment to achieving radical social re-engineering", and the government should adopt policies that ensure the poor do not have to shoulder the largest share of the ongoing financial burden to the nation arising from Brexit.

He said, "It is patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty," and added that compassion had been given up during nearly a decade of austerity so severe that key parts of the postwar social contract, William Beveridge worked out over 70 years ago, had been lost.

Alston visited towns and cities including London, Oxford, Cardiff, Newcastle, Glasgow and Belfast, then Alston said “obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in food banks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the government to appoint a minister for suicide prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard-of levels of loneliness and isolation”.

[22] Alston was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for "distinguished service to the law, particularly in the area of international human rights, and to legal education" in the 2021 Queen's Birthday Honours.