Background
In Mali, the initiative of drafting a parallel/shadow report to that of the Malian state, which signed and ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1966 and 1974, respectively, was encouraged by a suitable political and social background characterised by:
1.The existence of voluntarist public authorities and political forces more or less open to a dialogue with civil society organisations (CSOs);
2.The importance given to CSOs’ points of view, thanks to the experience developed by them in the fields of the promotion and defence of human rights in general, and of development, cooperation and international solidarity in a poor country like Mali;
3.The existence of CSOs and networks that are aware of the interrelation between development at grassroots level on the one hand and universality and interdependence of human rights on the other hand;
4.The existence of experts of human rights promotion and protection bodies that are familiar with development issues and understand the complexity of the United Nations system;
5.The importance given by the Malian state to the role of UN specialised institutions (UNESCO, UNICEF, UNDP essentially) in the fight against poverty through a human-rights based approach;
6.The influence of national and sub-regional networks on the drafting of poverty alleviation strategic documents;
7.The recurrent exposure of serious failures with regard to the ESC rights of the most vulnerable people categories (children, women, elderly and handicapped people).
Objectives
The parallel/shadow report to that of the Malian state was drafted with the aim of:
- Assessing the level of implementation of the ICESCR, that Mali ratified in 1974, without reservation, although it did not comply with its obligation to present periodic reports;
- Ensuring the legitimacy of citizens’ claims in terms of social rights towards national institutions (Parliament, government, courts and tribunals...), the international community and ICESCR monitoring bodies.
The Shadow Report was seen as a means, for citizens, to exert pressure upon the Malian state, which is a party to the ICESCR, and to promote their social claims. It was supposed to enable them to:
- Widely circulate, via research work and information activities on the field, the notion of economic, social and cultural rights, in order to prepare obligation holders to fulfil their duty to promote, protect and implement these rights, and to encourage citizens to claim them.
- Guide public decision makers on precise political objectives and identify citizens’ priorities in terms of access to and enjoyment of human rights, in consultation with them.
- Amplify social and economic development synergies initiated by the grassroots and stirred by the social mobilisation brought about by the drafting of the report, in order to encourage enforceability and justiciability strategies, in the absence of any Optional Protocol;
- Set up an internal human rights enforceability and monitoring mechanism with the aim of ensuring access to and enjoyment of human rights.
- Prepare a brief document to be presented in the public session of the UN Committee on ESC rights in Geneva, in parallel with the presentation of the official state’s report or in the absence of any such report. The aim was to influence the Committee’s final recommendations on the report presented by the state or in the absence thereof.
Stakeholders involved in the dynamic
The goal of the Malian ESC rights platform was to confront the various points of view and working approaches, and to carry out an objective and comprehensive search for information and case review. It also intended to ensure, in the long run, a broad support to enforceability strategies that were to be defined, along with final recommendations. And so, it chose to follow a grassroots and inclusive approach throughout the report drafting process.
A great variety of stakeholders from social, economic and professional sectors participated in the drafting of the shadow report. They included CSOs (including trade unions), social and professional organisations, women and youth associations, poor sectors communities and multidisciplinary experts. Yet, it was decided not to involve political players (parties). Although it is necessary to collaborate with them, such collaboration is more difficult to manage, especially when no official report has been presented, as is the case in Mali.
Indeed, the exchange of views is not always easy, and compulsory mandates may undermine objectivity and political independence of recommendations.
Platform members realised, though, while the process was ongoing, that the common goal of obtaining the adoption of a legislation conducive to the implementation of the report’s recommendations in terms of human rights protection and fulfilment, implied an intelligent collaboration with institutional experts, parliament members, national political forces and the national human rights commission, whose mandate is to support the drafting of official reports.
Shadow report drafting method
For the purpose of drafting the shadow report, in the absence of any official report, the ESC rights platform of Mali had to carry out a comprehensive assessment of ESC rights implementation in the country. The platform’s organisations first organised their work at internal level and sought to gather, to the furthest possible extent, all social movements of national relevance, academes, local communities’ representatives and public structures, to discuss human rights. The goal was to bring everyone to the same level of information and to build up a consensus, from the onset, about what human rights issues and geographical zones should be given priority, the approach and investigation techniques to adopt, the objectives that could be shared and the role of each player.
CSOs then devoted time to think about how to ensure the pluralistic and decentralised character of the approach. Decentralisation is a reality in Mali, however, the transfer of almost all competences to the new local authorities has not yet given rise to the allocation of all associated resources – the state still retains all its powers. The drafting of a shadow report may help identify bottlenecks and confer the decentralisation process a greater efficiency by empowering local communities to assert their rights.
Learned methodological requirements
It is necessary to be precise and objective about:
- human rights categories to analyse in a national or regional background and in a universal manner;
- situations of discrimination and non-fulfilment of rights, by carrying out:
* an analysis of official statistics established according to international standards, which provide annual averages that often hide serious situations of discrimination of vulnerable and poor people categories (children, women, elderly, handicapped people, lone individuals in predicament…).
* a country’s multicultural situation analysis.
The necessary field research to be conducted with rights may be completed by case studies illustrative of:
- needs, issues and expectations of all country’s social and professional categories,
- zones of poverty and exclusion and where people live in precarious conditions,
- the gender situation and chronic human rights violations;
It is necessary, at last:
- to foster the participation of opinion leaders and organisations representative of poor sectors, to get the contribution of OSC experts with a good local reputation,
- to organise decentralised conferences and workshops in the various regions to make the various players familiar with the approach and associated challenges,
- to broadly share the results of research with all players having participated in the process, development cooperation institutions and agencies.
The following steps were followed to conduct fact finding missions:
- Setting up of issue-based research groups endorsed by the General Assembly. These groups were constituted with volunteer members on the basis of their experience and their knowledge of both addressed issues and intervention zones.
- Training of group members to the spirit of the ICESCR and investigation methods.
- Elaboration and validation of information collection tools.
- Appointment of official regional focal points for the facilitation and execution of enquiries. These focal points and thematic groups collected information and reported it to coordination structures for their scrutiny and analysis and for the drafting of baseline reports. To that purpose, it was previously necessary to:
- Identy reliable and verifiable information sources: Theoretical sources containing basic documents and tools required to draft the report. Official sources such as documents produced by the various state’s sectors, national enquiries, national statistics, successive national budgets of the past five years… Case studies, reports, stories… from OSC, the academic system, the press, international bodies, the UN system, etc.
- Take stock of the situation of ESC rights in the country (carry out a comprehensive assessment). To that purpose, various points of view and criteria were cross-analysed, including those of states that did not submit their initial report.
- Gather valid and efficient working tools: the platform made sure that only proven indicators, irrefutable and updated statistics, well-documented case studies and verified testimonies for the drafting were compiled in its report.
MATRIX OF COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS OF INFORMATION FOR THE REPORT
Types of rights
- Right to education
- Right to health
- Right to food
- Right to housing and access to land
- Right to work and to social protection
Right to culture
Information to collect according to research grids
- Constitutional, conventional, legislative and statutory provisions
- Status of right fulfilment: progress made
- Exposed failures, general causes, victims’ profile, consequences
- Institutional, political, judicial, social, cultural and economic limitations
Priority geographic zones
- Regional approach: selection of regions according to the severity of problems encountered in relation to the rights addressed
- National approach: triangulation of information at the level of institutions and structures of national dimension
Documentary sources
- Constitutions, laws, decrees, orders, decisions
- Public policy documents
- National sector-based program documents
- International covenants and treaties
- National and international study reports on rights issues
- Citizen complaints documents
- Court and tribunal orders
Players to target
- State and para-state structures
- Non-state structures (CSOs, associations, religious associations…)
- Citizens victims of breaches of human rights
- Citizens having witnessed human rights violations
- United Nation bodies
- International cooperation bodies
Illustrative cases
- Stories about cases of breaches of emblematic rights
Uses
- Highlighting consistency of actions taken with ratified instruments
- State of knowledge of the right in question by:
the state party
public services in charge of promoting, protecting and fulfiling human rights
citizens as right-holders - Typology of the most threatened and frequently violated rights, the fulfilment of which is the most urgent, in a way suited to the various social categories and geographic zones as well as from a general/universal standpoint
- Specific and general final recommendations
The steps detailed here below were followed for the drafting, the validation and the publication of the shadow report:
- Creation of specific working groups for each human right recognised by the ICESCR and addressed as part of the approach as well as by the population’s vulnerable sectors. Each group appointed a thematic rapporteur for research feedback.
- Setting up of a group of resource people appointed within the orientation core for the drafting of the general report.
- Setting up of a group of “prominent readers” of the report.
- Constitution of a panel of experts by issue for public debates.
- Holding of workshops for the feedback of baseline studies.
- Holding of workshops for the feedback and validation of the general report.
- Publication of the report with public panel discussions.
Lessons learned
- In the absence of any state’s official report and of any study on ESC rights, and given difficulties to access statistics, the carrying out of field case studies is indispensable to avail of current data on human rights to be addressed;
- importance of the group in the carrying out of field work;
- possibility to capitalise spaces created by each member organisation within the framework of the implementation of its action plan;
- necessity to update all stakeholders before starting the shadow report drafting process;
- possibility to produce a credible report in spite of financial resources constraints;
- possibility to foster public debates on the shadow report’s conclusions and to improve public policies accordingly;
- genuine respect of civil society by public authorities and partners through a politically independent and objective work;
- effectiveness and efficiency of the collective process to overcome bottlenecks in the drafting of the report on sensitive issues such as human rights, positive impact of such process on the shadow report’s legitimacy.
STATES SHOULD ABSOLUTELY NOT BE CONSIDERED AS ADVERSARIES TO BE OVERLOOKED BUT AS PARTNERS IN ADVANCING THE NATIONAL CAUSE
