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Nations’ Deep Concerns with Treaty Bodies Revealed
By C-FAM Staff
SION, SWITZERLAND - - (May 19, 2011) - - (C-FAM) A long-brewing battle between UN member states and the UN bureaucracy broke into the open last week in Sion, Switzerland. At issue is how UN treaty monitoring bodies do their business.
UN treaty monitoring bodies are supposed to report on how governments comply with international treaties. In recent years these bodies have become more and more assertive in reinterpreting existing treaties and trying to impose their views on UN member states.
In recent years, the treaty monitoring bureaucracy has expressed an interest in reforming the process and this has caused concern among UN member states as they see the human rights bureaucrats grabbing for more power.
After months of bureaucratic reports and meeting, the UN bureaucracy finally gave countries a chance to give their input and the governments gave them an earful.
Singapore expressed the wide-spread frustration that it took so long, years in fact, for governments to be given a chance to give their input.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay complained of understaffing and underfunding as the reasons for a huge backlog of reporting to these committees. She said their needed to be a “harmonization” of the system, meaning the treaty bodies ought to be folded into a single body.
Member states said the backlog was due to the tendency of the treaty monitoring bodies to get involved in extraneous activities not central to their mission. The United Kingdom and the African Group were among the countries questioning these additional activities of treaty bodies. The UK suggested that it was these additional activities that were the real reason for the backlogs of the treaty bodies, and not lack of meeting time or resources
Another complaint is the growing instance of treaty bodies issuing “general comments” that attempt to reinterpret existing treaties. The UK representative said, “We see general comments as one-sided interpretations of international treaties.” Egypt and the African group made similar statements on this topic.
A member of the Committee on the Rights of the Child said there are emerging issues not contemplated at the time of treaty adoption that must be addressed, citing climate change and children as one example.
China was unusually vocal at the meeting, and stressed a common theme that treaty body members ought to place more importance on the concerns of the States Parties as creators of the treaty body system.
Many countries were upset at the limited time for them to speak about treaty body reform, even at the two-day meeting that was supposed to be devoted to their input. UN staff and treaty body members dominated most of the panels in Sion, with member states only allowed to ask questions at the end. And even in these Q and A sessions, much of the time was allotted to additional treaty body members present.
“This is not a real discussion,” complained the Cuban representative.
In the past year, three major statements on treaty body reform were issued by UN experts, and focused on a long-standing proposal to fold all treaty monitoring bodes into a single entity, a proposal that has been consistently rejected by States Parties.
Despite requests for more meetings with member states, none of the additional treaty body meetings announced include them in the discussions.
C-FAM Staff write for C-FAM. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (http://www.c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.
Light To Guide Our Feet Victory Bulletin [LTGOFVB May 2011]
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