Treaty Body Monitor: change in reporting

Focus on ‘concluding observations’

Treaty Body Monitor: change in reporting

Focus on ‘concluding observations’

Beginning in March 2009, ISHR changed the format of its treaty body reporting.  Concluding its narrative thematic summaries of the examination of States before the treaty bodies, reports will now focus on a number of concluding observations for each State examined, and will provide an assessment of how these were addressed in the examination, including the initial views of the State, questions, comments and responses provided. Each report will address 4-5 concluding observations on the basis of time that the Committee dedicated to the issue, whether they requested follow-up on implementation, and whether the final recommendation was specific and implementable within a certain timeframe. 

A tool for advocacy

The purpose of this approach is to assist national NGOs and NHRIs in seeing how the Committees arrived at their recommendations and to be aware of the views that the State has already expressed. It is hoped that this will serve as an additional advocacy tool for pursuing implementation of these recommendations at the national level.

A smaller selection of States

In addition, ISHR will no longer report on all States being examined by the treaty bodies. Instead, it will report on certain countries on the basis of a number of criteria, including those where NGOs and NHRIs have already submitted information to the Committees and may find the new ISHR reports useful. Those States not reported on in the Treaty Body Monitor will be summarised in ISHR’s 2009 Human Rights Monitor. ISHR will continue to monitor all treaty bodies with the exception of the Committee on the Rights of Child, whose examinations are fully reported by the NGO Group for the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In this section you will also find information related to the drafting of general comments, themtaic discussions and discussions related to the working methods of the treaty bodies.

Simply choose the treaty body you are interested in and then either:

• Browse by country, to find the reports on the examination of a given country by the treaty body you have selected, or
• Browse by session, to find the reports related to a given session of the treaty body you have selected