Comments on the UN High Commissioner's Proposals Aimed at Strengthening the UN Human Rights Treaty Body System

The UN treaty body system is a child of the Cold War. After many years of negotiations in the former Commission on Human Rights and the Third Committee of the General Assembly during the 1950s and 1960s, representatives of Western, Socialist and Southern States finally reached a compromise on the basis of the lowest common denominator among fundamentally diverging views on human rights and monitoring of States' compliance with their treaty obligations. While the West had been advocating an effective system of monitoring States' compliance with civil and political rights by means of individual complaints, the Socialist States had a clear priority for economic, social and cultural rights but were strictly opposed to any type of complaints system which they considered as undue interference with State sovereignty. African States and other non-aligned States were at that time primarily interested in combating colonialism, apartheid and similar forms of racial discrimination. This explains why the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) of 1965 was the first UN human rights (core) treaty that established a specific monitoring body consisting of 18 independent experts entrusted with the task of examining State reports, inter-State complaints and (optional) individual complaints. One year later, the two UN Covenants were adopted with two different monitoring systems. For the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), the West had finally succeeded in establishing an independent expert body, the Human Rights Committee, but the Socialist States ensured that this remained a fairly toothless body only entrusted with examining State reports. Both the inter-State and the individual complaints procedures were optional and had been watered down to individual "communications" to be decided after a purely written procedure by means of legally non-binding "final views". Since neither the West nor the East opted for a strong monitoring system regarding economic, social and cultural rights, the supervision of States' compliance with their "progressive" obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) was originally even entrusted to ECOSOC, a political body composed of State representatives.