The global human rights 'implementation agenda' and the genesis of NMIRFs

Abstract

For as long as international human rights law has existed, commentators have spoken of an 'implementation gap' between universal standards and national reality. A key reason for that gap was the international community's preference for elaborating norms and delivering recommendations to bring State practices into line with those norms, over and above any interest in how - and indeed, whether - States were implementing those recommendations. That situation only began to change over the past six or seven years as some States - especially Small States with limited resources - began to experiment with new and more efficient ways to translate UN recommendations into improved laws and policies. These States realised that having different and distinct inter-ministerial structures to implement and report on recommendations, depending on the UN mechanism or treaty in question, it would be more efficient to have one single mechanism at national level that would be responsible for coordinating the implementation of (clustered) recommendations received from all the UN human rights mechanisms, for continuously tracking levels of implementation and impact, and for using that tracking information to more easily prepare periodic progress reports back the mechanisms. These pioneering States were building the world's first 'national mechanisms for implementation, reporting and follow-up' (NMIRFs - although this name was not used at the time). This chapter seeks to set down, on the historical record, this early history of NMIRFs. It also analyses the key characteristics of NMIRFs, considers their quantitive and qualitative evolution, and recalls how the international human rights community has belatedly begun to show an interest in these mechanisms as a key diver of progress towards the full enjoyment of human rights, securing the Sustainable Development Goals leaving no one behind, and building national resilience (to prevent crises and conflicts). That interest includes early efforts to identify international best practices and to codify these in international principles for the establishment and Development of NMIRFs.