Press conference by human rights committee chair

 

Immediately following the closing today of the eighty-sixth session of the Human Rights Committee at Headquarters, its Chairperson, Christine Chanet, France’s expert, briefed correspondents at Headquarters on the session.

In the three weeks since the session opened on 13 March, the 18-member expert body, which monitors States parties’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, heard reports from:  the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China; and Norway.  It also heard from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, in a closed session without a periodic report.

The Committee also held several closed meetings to consider, among other items, task forces on the United States and on the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).  It will examine the report of the United States at the second of three public annual sessions, in Geneva in July.  The United States’ report (document E/CN.4/2006/120) was already available on the website.  A task force was elaborating a list of issues, which will be made public in a few days.

In addition, she said, the Committee had been reviewing a portion of the more than 300 communications from individuals claiming to be victims of rights violations under the First Optional Protocol to the Covenant.  Joining Ms. Chanet today was Elisabeth Palm, expert from Sweden, and Rafael Rivas Posada, expert from Colombia.  The experts serve in their personal capacities for four years.

Asked how the Chairperson, under the wider reform efforts under way at the United Nations, including in the human rights sphere, envisaged reforming the Committee, Ms. Chanet reminded correspondents that the Covenant was a Treaty and that the function of a treaty and its organization had its own context and rules.  So, what the Committee could do was to try to improve its procedures within that framework, which was binding and not really open to change.

Regarding questions about the Committee’s procedures for convening open versus closed meetings, she said the experts tried not to have closed meetings, but it had to do so in the case of individual communications under the Protocol.  Often, a meeting was closed to protect the communication from a non-governmental organization, but if all non-governmental organizations present wished a meeting to be public, then the Committee could consider opening its doors.

In a follow-up, the correspondent said that many non-governmental organizations often posted their communications to the Committee and reports on their website, hoping to draw as much attention to them as possible.  Given that, they would probably want to exercise the option of having their communications with the Committee open or public.

Ms. Chanet replied that having reports on a website was one thing, but it might be a real risk to the non-governmental organizations’ relationship with their host countries to open to the public their communication with the Committee members.  The Committee had to be very careful about that.  She felt it was the Committee’s responsibility to protect the organizations in that way.

Responding to a question about doing a better job of protecting the rights of peoples in the Middle East, she said that the Committee was only “in charge” of monitoring peoples whose Governments were parties to the Covenant, and in the Middle East many States were not part of the Covenant.  The international community, therefore, should encourage those countries to join the Covenant.

To a series of questions about the report from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she explained that, yes, the country was Zaire when it joined the Covenant more than 20 years ago.  It had been 15 years since the Government had reported to the Committee, and there was a lot of ground to cover.  Normally, States came before the Committee every four or five years, but the fact that a country had changed its name in no way affected its continuing obligations under the legal instrument.  The experts were very concerned about the violence that had taken place, and, in their concluding observations, they had called on the Congolese authorities to take all possible measures to stop the human rights violations, including by identifying and punishing the perpetrators.

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For information media • not an official record