AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

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Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights Project

Monitoring System

Monitoring provides the means by which governmental and nongovernmental organizations keep track of progress toward accomplishment of goals: in this case, fulfillment of the promises of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In ratifying the Covenant, states parties have adopted its goals as their own and must be able to monitor their performance in meeting the targets they have set for themselves. Some countries, such as South Africa, have included economic, social and cultural rights in their constitutions, along with the concomitant need to monitor them. Depending on the nature of their work, nongovernmental organizations also have a variety of reasons to monitor economic, social and cultural rights. Like governments, NGOs that are direct service providers must keep track of progress toward meeting their goals and objectives. NGOs that document and publicize human rights violations or protect and promote human rights through public interest litigation, need monitoring data to evaluate the government’s activities, analyze the data they collect from primary or secondary sources, or accumulate the evidence to build a legal case. Governmental and nongovernmental organizations alike need monitoring data to help them decide how best to allocate scarce resources.

Transparency is one of the principal safeguards operating to protect human rights in the world today. It is achieved by publicizing the status of human rights, making that knowledge available to local, national and international audiences, and thereby holding governments to account for their actions or inaction. Data collected by monitoring is the foundation for human rights reporting, and this reporting in turn is the vehicle that makes transparency possible. In addition to permitting public scrutiny of governmental actions, reporting also fulfills other important functions, including formulating policy, evaluating progress, acknowledging problems, and sharing information.

Reporting by states parties to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on their progress in reaching the goals of the ICESCR is a particularly important form of monitoring. The governmental transparency and accountability provided by this process is the chief mechanism available to enforce the Covenant. NGOs are vital actors in the treaty monitoring process, through the "shadow reports" they are encouraged to prepare, to accompany and offset the official reports by states parties, as well as the additional testimony they provide when the Committee reviews states parties’ reports. The AAAS/HURIDOCS project is independent of the CESCR; however, the project maintains ongoing communications with the ESCR Committee’s staff, and the Committee’s rapporteur is a member of the project’s Advisory Committee.

We believe that the creation of a simple and feasible computerized ESCR monitoring system, built on a violations approach, will be of great benefit to the Committee, to the states parties that are obliged to submit reports to it, and to the NGOs submitting shadow reports. Many governments and NGOs currently have little idea of how to monitor a state’s performance in living up to its obligations under the Covenant. Collecting and analyzing data and using it appropriately can be intimidating to organizations that are not specialists in monitoring and evaluation. One of the major themes of the project is to demystify and simplify the process of monitoring human rights, without sacrificing accuracy, validity or reliability.

To be most valuable to its intended audiences, a monitoring system must be easy to understand and to use, but it must also be accurate and able to capture valid information that faithfully reflects reality. For example, a monitoring system must be able to capture data disaggregated by relevant demographic and socioeconomic categories. Disaggregaged data can show whether there are patterns to the violations that are evidence of discrimination. In addition to disaggregating data by traditional categories of sex, age, ethnicity or region, in many countries it will be important to show that particular clusters of violations occur in special settings such as export processing zones.