22/02/2010

Some States against the mentioning of the original wording of recommendations

A debate started Friday 19 February on whether including in Working Group Reports footnotes containing the original wording of recommendations.1 Egypt seized the opportunity offered by the adoption of its own Report to question the relevance of listing recommendations both in their accepted wording and in their original one as delivered during the interactive dialogue. Making reference to a recommendation by Chile, the delegate asked where did the use of footnotes start and mentioned that they could not accept this footnote until it said that the change of the wording was requested by Chile. This proposal to take that footnote off was backed by Pakistan, Nigeria and Cuba. Pakistan said that there was no point in including this footnote and Cuba that getting rid of it would diminish words number.
 
Taking the opposite view, the Netherlands and the United States defended the utility of those footnotes. They both believed that Reports were supposed to reflect the interactive dialogue and not "rewrite history".

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1. At the beginning of the UPR process, recommendations were listed both in the first part of the Reports summarizing the interactive dialogue and in the second part dedicated to recommendations. Sometimes, the wording of the same recommendation would change between the two parts. However, in order to reduce the size of Reports, as of session 5 and Afghanistan and Yemen's Reports, recommendations were only listed in the second part. Footnotes containing the original wording of recommendations as read during the interactive dialogue were then included.