4/55 The right to development - Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

UNITED NATIONS

A

General Assembly Distr. GENERAL

A/HRC/4/55 14 February 2007

Original: ENGLISH

HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL Fourth session Item 2 of the provisional agenda

IMPLEMENTATION OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION 60/251 OF 15 MARCH 2006 ENTITLED “HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL”

The right to development

Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights*

The Human Rights Council, by decision 2/102 of 6 October 2006, requested the High Commissioner for Human Rights to “continue with the fulfilment of her activities, in accordance with all previous decisions adopted by the Commission on Human Rights and to update the relevant reports and studies”. On the issue of the right to development, a comprehensive annual report (E/CN.4/2006/24) was submitted to the sixty-second session of the Commission on Human Rights pursuant to its resolution 1998/72. The information in the report remains relevant, and is complemented by the report submitted more recently to the General Assembly (A/61/211) pursuant to its resolution 60/157. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights understands decision 2/102 as preserving the previous annual reporting cycle in respect of this issue until otherwise decided by the Council. The present report to the Human Rights Council accordingly addresses developments in respect of the right to development over the last year.

* The present report was submitted later than the indicated deadline, in order to incorporate the latest available information on the subject matter. GE.07-10788 (E) 200207

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Activities relating to the implementation of the right to development

1. In accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 1/4 of 30 June 2006, which endorsed the recommendations of the seventh session of the Working Group on the Right to Development, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights undertook preparations for the implementation of the recommendations and for the third session of the high-level task force on the implementation of the right to development.

2. The mandate of the task force was to apply the criteria for periodic evaluation of global development partnerships - as identified on Millennium Development Goal 8 (MDG 8) - from the perspective of the right to development, on a pilot basis, to selected partnerships, with a view to operationalizing and progressively developing these criteria, and thus contributing to mainstreaming the right to development in the policies and operational activities of relevant actors at the national, regional and international levels, including multilateral financial, trade and development institutions (see E/CN.4/2006/26, para. 77).

3. The third session of the task force took place from 22 to 26 January 2007 in Geneva, at which a dialogue took place between the expert members of the task force, representatives of institutional members of the task force, and representatives of the organizations involved in the above-mentioned partnerships. Member States observers also participated in the rich and fruitful discussions of the meeting.

4. The three partnerships selected for an initial assessment by the task force were the following: the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM); the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA)/Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) Mutual Review of Development Effectiveness in the context of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD); and the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

5. In line with the practical and action-oriented approach adopted by the Working Group on the Right to Development in recent years, the task force deemed it important to ensure that the implementation of the right to development be supported by an operational framework that is conceptually and methodologically rigorous. Furthermore, building upon comparative experiences in the implementation of other partnerships and their monitoring mechanisms - to the extent of legitimate overlap with the above criteria - will help avoid having application of these criteria “reinvent the wheel”. The exercise of piloting the criteria would also contribute to revealing the distinctive attributes brought by the right to development, in a practical sense.

6. In addition to an initial assessment of the three partnerships above, the task force concluded that the right to development framework has value-added for the partnerships it reviewed, and that continued refinement and application of the criteria could make significant contributions to the current and future partnerships, and might possibly inspire them to explicitly factor essential elements of the right to development into their respective operational frameworks. To this end, the task force suggested that additional development partnerships, within the scope of MDG 8, be considered.

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7. The report of the task force, including its conclusions and recommendations (A/HRC/4/WG.2/TF/2), will be submitted to the eighth session of the Working Group on the Right to Development, to be held in Geneva from 26 February to 2 March 2007.

8. In the period covered by this report, several events were organized on the right to development at which OHCHR participated. The Egyptian National Human Rights Council organized a conference in Cairo to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Declaration on the Right to Development, on 2 and 3 December 2006, at which experts in the field of development and human rights, the Chairperson of the Working Group on the Right to Development and OHCHR were represented. The discussions during this meeting, which was attended by many representatives of the Government of Egypt and civil society organizations, focused on both national and international dimensions of the right to development, including national-level implementation, the role of international actors independently and in partnership, as well as on what international partnerships could do to focus their efforts more effectively towards realization of the right to development.

9. During the third session of the Human Rights Council, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung foundation organized a panel discussion and expert meeting in Geneva on 29 and 30 November 2006, respectively. The panel discussion held on 29 November intended to raise awareness among those attending the Council session about the twentieth anniversary of the Declaration on the Right to Development and recent developments in the right-to-development process. The expert meeting on 30 November aimed to inform representatives of several national development agencies about the right-to-development criteria adopted by the Working Group on the Right to Development at its seventh session, and to explore the possibilities of involving these institutions in the implementation process.

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