Introduction

Maintaining the supervisory procedures of the human rights treaty bodies calls for a certain sleight of hand – to turn less into more. At a period when the treaty bodies are seeking to make the monitoring system more effective, and when the demands on them are increasing (more parties, more reports, more individual communications), the resources available to support their work seem to be diminishing.

Insufficicent resources have been a constant problem for the treaty bodies. Despite provisions in some instruments that ‘the Secretary-General of the United Nations shall provide the necessary staff and facilities for the effective performance of the functions of the Committee' it has long been recognised that the funding of the treaty bodies and their resources are inadequate to allow them to carry out their mandate effectively. Too few professional staff have been assigned to treaty body work, and even those staff who have been assigned to this work have sometimes been seconded to other work. Some meetings have been cancelled, interpreting has sometimes been restricted and summary records are sometimes not prepared.

Far from improving, this situation threatens to get worse. Limits have been imposed on documentation and delays in translations have been chronic. Petty restrictions on the distribution of documents have frustrated the work of the Human Rights Committee (HRC). These demoralising restrictions have come at a time when the increase in ratifications, in the number of communications and in the length of reports, together with the Committee's attempts to make its procedure more effective, have increased the workload of the Secretariat.