24/02/2010

More and more accepted recommendations are considered as already implemented

A new trend has emerged at the UPR in the framework of responses to recommendations. More and more States under Review are considering some recommendations to be "either already implemented or in the process of implementation".

This category of recommendations appeared in the Report of the Working Group of Uzbekistan (session 3) and has been ever since used increasingly over the sessions: one State in session 4 (China), two in session 5 (Viet Nam and Yemen), five in session 6 (Albania, Costa Rica, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Portugal) and five in session 7 (Bolivia, the Gambia, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua and Qatar).

At first, this category used to concern recommendations that were neither accepted nor rejected, but simply "noted". However, since Yemen, SuR are using this category for recommendations that are accepted, thus reducing the number of recommendations on which they commit to take action while keeping the number of accepted recommendations high.

In addition, the number of recommendations included in this category keeps increasing. Hence, during session 6, Albania considered 53 recommendations out of the 85 accepted to be "already implemented or in the process of implementation", Costa Rica 32 out of 86 and the DRC 58 out of 124. And during last session, it was 66 recommendations out of 78 for Bolivia and 68 out of 102 for Kazakhstan. Nicaragua even considered that all of its accepted recommendations were already implemented.