Introduction: consolidation and diversity

In his 1997 final report on the human rights treaty bodies, Philip Alston proposed an expert group study of the modalities for consolidating the six treaty bodies. But neither in his final report nor in the interim report submitted to the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 did Alston specifically discuss the consolidation issue. Instead he referred to the discussion in an earlier (1989) report in which he had presented consolidation into ‘one or perhaps two new treaty bodies’ as ‘[t]he most radical option’ that had yet been put forward to address mounting problems such as system overload, resource constraints, and the burdensome proliferation of reporting duties on states. In that 1989 report, Alston signalled that long-term consolidation may eventually warrant serious consideration, but the general focus of his discussion at that time was that consolidation might well prove retrogressive. Without taking a position, he addressed some potentially problematic aspects of consolidation in the following terms: