A/HRC/13/39/Add.5
I.
The mandate and State cooperation
A.
Introduction
1.
As former Secretary General Kofi Annan has rightly emphasized in his report “In
Larger Freedom”, security, development and human rights constitute the three main pillars
of the United Nations. There will be no security without development, no development
without security, and both depend on an effective system for the protection of human
rights.1 Within the United Nations, human rights have been promoted and protected since
World War II by a more or less fruitful cooperation between four main types of actors:
States, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), independent experts and the UN
secretariat.
2.
Formally speaking, States are the most important actors. Only States are members of
the United Nations and its decision making bodies, such as the General Assembly, the
Security Council, ECOSOC, the Human Rights Council and its predecessor, the
Commission on Human Rights. States also bear the primary responsibility for
implementing international human rights standards, be it by respecting human rights against
interference by governmental actors, by fulfilling human rights through positive State
action and by protecting human rights against interference by private actors. At the same
time, States belong to the main perpetrators of human rights violations. No State is immune
from violating human rights, and all Governments are keen to hide their human rights
violations from the outside world. But as more democratic and transparent Governments
are, as more open they are towards monitoring, fact-finding, justified criticism and
accountability.
3.
NGOs and civil society have been the driving force behind the UN human rights
agenda since its very beginning in the 1940s. NGOs demanded the elaboration of binding
international human rights treaties and the creation of independent monitoring bodies and
effective measures for the implementation of human rights at the domestic level. At the
same time, civil society, including NGOs, academia, independent media and investigative
journalists, are among the main sources of information about the factual situation of human
rights in all countries of the world. By allowing international NGOs to actively participate,
speak and distribute written reports in the former Commission and present Human Rights
Council, the United Nations have significantly enhanced the objectivity of the international
human rights discourse.
4.
Independent experts have played an increasingly active role within the human rights
system of the United Nations since the late 1960s. On the basis of ECOSOC Res. 1235
(XLII) of 1967, the former Commission on Human Rights entrusted working groups and
later individual experts to investigate the overall human rights situation in those States
which were particularly criticized for gross and systematic violations of human rights
(country-specific mandates). With the establishment of the UN Working Group on
Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances in 1980, the Commission created the first thematic
mechanism with a global mandate. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture was established
in 1985 with a mandate to investigate the phenomena of torture, cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment in all States and to provide annual reports and
assessments to the United Nations. Independent experts have also been elected to UN
human rights treaty bodies entrusted with the monitoring of States parties’ compliance with
their respective treaty obligations.
1
A/59/2005.
3