Awareness raising

A phased process of raising awareness of unresolved issues related to respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms among participating states and, ultimately, raising public awareness represents an important element in a chain of sequenced steps available in case of uncooperativeness of the respondent state at early phases of cooperation, fact finding and the confidential review of individual cases. It is supposed to raise the political cost of uncooperativeness and lack of redress for the states concerned.

United Nations

Based on the findings of country visits, the Working Group on Situations may refer a case to the HRC, which examines it in closed meetings in a confidential manner at regular sessions. The HRC may decide, by a majority of votes, to:

• keep the situation under review and request the state concerned to provide further information within a reasonable period of time

• keep the situation under review and appoint an independent and highly qualified expert to monitor the situation and report back to the HRC

• discontinue considering the situation when further consideration or action is not warranted

• discontinue reviewing the matter under the confidential complaint procedure in order to take up public consideration of the case.

All materials provided by individuals and governments, as well as the decisions taken at the various stages of the procedure, remain confidential and are not made public. This also applies to situations the examination of which by the HRC has been discontinued.

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As of January 2013, several cases related to OSCE participating states had been reviewed by the HRC under the confidential compliance procedure. These include:

• human rights in Turkmenistan

o twice in 2008, discontinued in 2009 at the tenth session o again in 2012, discontinued at the nineteenth session

• human rights situation in Tajikistan, examined three times in 2011, discontinued in 2011 at the eighteenth session

• human rights situation in Uzbekistan in 2007, discontinued at the fourth session

• human rights situation in Kyrgyzstan in 2006, discontinued at the second session.

In 2012 the HRC appointed a special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus.

The Universal Periodic Review is a more public states-driven process of reviewing the record of implementation of obligations of all UN members related to human rights. It is rooted in the previous pattern of the UN Commission on Human Rights and provides states with the opportunity to self-report, or to declare what actions they have taken to improve the human rights situations in their countries and fulfil their human rights obligations.

At the same time, all states are supposed to review which recommendations issued to them they have implemented and which they have not. The discussion of countries’ reports is open to human rights NGOs and is often critical.

Council of Europe

The monitoring procedure in particular includes several options to raise awareness of enduring non-compliance of member states with their obligations and commitments subject to the procedure. Apart from making relevant reports public, issuing respective resolutions and extending the monitoring, the Parliamentary Assembly may decide, by a qualified majority of votes, to bring a country case to the attention of the CoE Committee of Ministers, where the case is handled in a confidential manner.

56 OSCE Focus Conference Proceedings, 11 – 12 October 2014

The patterns of execution of the ECHR, and particularly of unsatisfactory execution, are regularly brought to the attention of the Committee of Ministers by the court.

OSCE

The awareness-raising procedures within the OSCE are supposed to go through several phases, and remain state-driven at all of them.

In the early stages of the CSCE, the debate concentrated on:

• whether the compliance debate within the CSCE would be based, as it was at that time within the United Nations, on a self-reporting procedure in which states declare steps taken to implement their commitments, or whether it would be based on dialogue enabling any participating state to raise any issue of alleged non-compliance

• whether the compliance debate would be institutionalized within the CSCE by arranging that each follow-up meeting should begin with an implementation debate to precede discussion of new proposals

• how many sessions of the follow-up meetings would be open to the public.

All these issues were ultimately resolved between 1989 and 1991, and the debate culminated at the Moscow meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE. In the document adopted in Moscow the participating states “categorically and irrevocable” declared that “the commitments undertaken in the field of the human dimension of the CSCE are matters of direct and legitimate concern to all participating States and do not belong exclusively to the internal affairs of the state concerned”.⁶ This conclusion was recently reconfirmed in the Astana Commemorative Declaration adopted by heads of state and government in 2010.

The introduction of the HDM in 1989 strengthened CSCE/OSCE awareness-raising procedures. Should requests for information and holding of bilateral meetings not help to resolve an issue, participating states which have triggered the mechanism have the option of drawing the attention of

6 Ibid., preamble, p. 2.

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other participating states to the specific cases (circulating the relevant information through ODIHR). This can be followed by the appointment of missions of experts (optional) and/or rapporteurs (mandatory). The findings and observations of these missions are brought to the attention of the participating states and the Permanent Council, which may decide on further steps. A rapporteurs’ report remains confidential until it has been discussed in the Permanent Council.

The ultimate phase of raising awareness, as designed at the Vienna follow-up meeting in 1989, was discussed at three meetings of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE scheduled between 1989 and 1991. These were tasked to review the implementation of the HDM in both closed and public sessions.

In 1992 the CSCE Helsinki summit decided to transform the conference into the annual human dimension implementation meeting organized by ODIHR and supported by a series of seminars on relevant themes within the human dimension. While initially the HDIM was supposed to be held at the level of experts from participating states and granted human rights NGOs only the right to circulate written inputs, at later stages it opened up for the direct participation of NGOs. Over time the HDIM has largely decoupled itself from the OSCE HDM and is no longer operational in that context.

For the time being the HDM procedures are dormant at best, and are invoked by states extremely rarely. This is not least due to the fact that other remedies for human rights abuses are now available to more participating states and non-governmental actors, the most important of which is the CoE human rights protection mechanism.