CYIL 2014

JAN LHOTSKÝ CYIL 5 ȍ2014Ȏ for maintaining focus on specific human rights, the reform proposal did not gain enough support. 3.2 Treaty Body Strengthening Based on experience and bearing in mind the need to improve the system, the subsequent High Commissioner did not promote a ‘reform’ but in 2009 initiated a wide range of consultations that she called a ‘strengthening’. After some twenty negotiations with various stakeholders, in June 2012 she issued a report named Strengthening of the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Body System 17 in which she presented her proposals that were based on the more than two-year-long consultations and were therefore regarded as generally acceptable. The principle recommendation of the report was to introduce a ‘comprehensive reporting calendar’ to achieve higher cooperation by states parties in submitting reports and taking part in the review. Nowadays the schedule for the review of a state report is set after the submittal of the report. This means that, if a state does not cooperate, the review is postponed, often for many years. To avoid this, a fixed comprehensive reporting calendar based on a 100% rate of compliance should be introduced, according to which all states parties would know well in advance when the state will be reviewed, and it would be reviewed even in the absence of a report. The calendar would be based on a five-year cycle, which means that the states parties would have to submit for different treaty bodies a maximum of two reports per year. 18 Among other proposals there is a recommendation to use a ‘simplified reporting procedure’. This means that prior to the elaboration of the report the treaty body informs the state which issues it will concentrate on, and the replies of the state constitute a state report. By implementing this procedure, which is already being used by the Human Rights Committee, 19 the report would be more focused and the whole review time- and cost-saving. The report also contained a number of other recommendations, from which it is appropriate at least to mention the following – a strict adherence to page limitations, reducing translations of summary records, more focused treaty body concluding observations, creation of a joint treaty body working group on communications, supporting capacity-building activities relating to reporting, introducing webcasting and videoconferencing to enhance the visibility and accessibility of treaty bodies at the country level, establishment of a treaty body jurisprudence database on individual cases and strengthening of an implementation by follow-up procedures in all treaty bodies. 20 17 Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights A/66/860 of June 2012. 18 Ibid ., p. 37-46. 19 This procedure has been used in the Human Rights Committee under the name List of Issues Prior to Reporting (LOIPR). 20 For analysis of the particular recommendations contained in the report, see Egan, Suzanne. Strengthening the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Body System. Human Rights Law Review (vol. 13, no. 2, 2013), p. 209-243.

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