Committee against Torture opens forty-sixth session

9 May 2011

The Committee against Torture this morning opened its forty-sixth session, hearing a statement from Ibrahim Salama, Director of the Human Rights Treaties Division of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which was followed by discussion between him and the Committee’s Experts.

Mr. Salama said that the year 2011 was a challenging one for the strengthening process of the treaty body system. Following the High Commissioner’s call in 2009 to treaty body experts, States Parties, civil society actors and other stakeholders to initiate a process of reflection on ways and means to strengthen the treaty body system, a series of events had taken place, most recently in the Republic of Korea and more were scheduled in the coming months to bring together individual groups of stakeholders to solicit their views and concrete suggestions on strengthening the working methods of the treaty bodies and making them more efficient and effective for rights-holders worldwide. A consultation meeting for States Parties was scheduled for 12 and 13 May in Sion and consultations for United Nations entities and national level civil society actors were also planned for later in the year. A meeting of the Working Group on follow-up took place in January 2011 in Geneva which focused on the follow-up procedures related to concluding observations, decisions on communications, visits and inquiries, including an assessment of their effectiveness.

Mr. Salama said that this session would be the first session where the Committee Against Torture had four weeks and this would allow the Committee to increase the number of reports to be examined as well as the number of individual complaints to consider. The Committee would work together to prepare concrete and tailored proposals on improving the effectiveness of the human rights treaty bodies in order to better manage workloads as requested for all treaty bodies by the General Assembly. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights had worked closely with all the relevant units of the United Nations Office at Geneva to ensure that the highest possible level of servicing was provided to the treaty bodies but as there were limited resources all Committee Experts were called upon to take such considerations in the course of their work and to limit the length of documents and ensure their focus.

Claudio Grossman, Chairperson of the Committee against Torture, also noted that there would be a meeting in Sion this Thursday and Friday and said the Committee should discuss the mandate for that upcoming meeting and the work for harmonization. There was unanimity on the decision to meet in Sion and Member States had supported it. Although there was no radical magic bullet that could strengthen the treaty bodies, there were two sets of issues: one about coherence and working methods and another about resources. The more Member States were convinced that progress had been made on the Committee’s working methods, the more they would be willing to contribute to increasing budgets.

In the discussion, a Committee Expert asked what the Committee would do about political issues, for example, the Convention on Migrant Workers had not been ratified by most European countries nor by the United States and how could it become universal with such limitations and should there be a threshold for making a treaty universal? Another example was Pakistan that recently ratified the Convention against Torture with interesting reservations highlighting the issue of reservations that remained outstanding. Another Expert asked if the conclusions of the Sion meeting should go to a General Assembly Resolution to allow for progress to be made. A Committee member asked how many States parties had accepted to attend the Sion meeting? Would the issue of the general skepticism against ratifying Optional Protocols on individual complaints be raised? Committee Experts also raised questions concerning the translation of Committee documents and the responsibility of States parties for providing resources to the Committees.

In response, Mr. Salama confirmed that 70 States would be attending the Sion meeting with over 110 participants. He said the issue of resources should be tackled through a General Assembly resolution. Issues of ratification were taken care of by the Universal Periodic Review. Reservations would not be an issue in Sion because of the complications of international law.

Also this morning, the Committee approved its agenda. During this session, the Committee is scheduled to examine the reports of Finland, Ghana, Ireland, Kuwait, Mauritius, Monaco, Slovenia and Turkmenistan and will adopt final concluding observations on these reports before it concludes the session on 3 June.

The next meeting of the Committee will be on Tuesday, 10 May at 10 a.m. when it will consider the third periodic report of Slovenia (CAT/C/SVN/3).

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For use of the information media; not an official record