Australia to host workshop on improving reporting to the UN human rights treaty committees

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Media Release

Joint Statement By Attorney-General The Minister For Foreign Affairs And The Minister For Immigration And Multicultural Affairs

20 June 2001

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, the Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, and the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Philip Ruddock, announced today that Australia will host a workshop in Geneva on 19 June to focus on improving the process of reporting to the six UN human rights treaty committees.

The workshop is a key element of the Government's diplomatic initiative to improve the operation of the UN treaty bodies, announced on 5 April 2001. It will bring together, for the first time, key participants in the system to explore measures to streamline the reporting process. The focus will be on practical improvements with a demonstrable impact in the short to medium-term.

States are required to submit reports to the six treaty committees under the six core human rights instruments. This is a critical part of international human rights monitoring, but the pressures on the system now undermine its effectiveness.

The facts speak for themselves. The recently released report of Canadian academic, Professor Anne Bayefsky, noted that there were now over 1,200 overdue reports, yet only 1,600 have been considered by the Committees in the last 30 years. Furthermore, 70% of states have overdue reports and 110 states have five or more overdue reports. However, even if all overdue reports were submitted by States, the committees do not have the capacity or resources to consider them in a timely and effective manner. Each committee currently processes around 15 country reports a year, making it very difficult for them to make serious inroads into the backlog.

These burdens on the reporting process could be lessened considerably through the implementation of a number of procedural measures to reduce the excessive paper burden on States Parties, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the treaty committees. This could include measures to reduce duplication, produce shorter, thematic reports and more sensible timeframes for the submission of periodic reports.

The workshop is a timely opportunity to build support for these measures and to explore strategies for their successful implementation.

Australia's leading role in this process demonstrates the Government's strong commitment to strengthening international human rights monitoring by the treaty committees.