Monitoring human rights and writing reports is dealt with in detail in the Fahamu course "Investigating, Monitoring and Reporting Human Rights Violations." This course will help you develop the skills of conducting and reporting impartial and accurate research into human rights abuses. It will be of benefit to anybody in NGOs and other groups promoting rights-based advocacy or seeking to defend human rights. Information on this course can be found at http://www.fahamu.org.

Government obligations

How do we know if a government is fulfilling its obligations with respect to the various kinds of rights contained in treaties that they have signed and ratified?

Make a list of ways that you might do this.

We can assess whether a government is fulfilling its obligations through a process of monitoring. We can use different methods to monitor the government's actions to see whether they are fulfilling their treaty obligations under international, regional and domestic law, and then assess whether these actions are sufficient.

Many of the major international and regional treaties include specific mechanisms for monitoring rights.

For example, the Convention on Child Rights says that state parties (that have ratified the convention) should submit an annual report to the United Nations on steps the government has taken to implement the rights contained in the convention. In this way the United Nations monitors the application of the convention in individual countries.

How to monitor

At a local level, you may monitor a particular situation or a series of situations in your community or country on an ongoing basis. As you proceed you will build up a picture of the human rights situation in your country.

This information will help you to compile a comprehensive report on your findings. You can then send this report to the appropriate government department and ask them to answer to the claims you are making (if the report is critical of the government).

You can also send your monitoring reports to other organisations, the media and so on to help them build up a picture of the human rights situation in your community.

You can use your findings to measure whether the government is fulfilling its obligations in terms of international or regional treaties.

You can monitor rights in different ways:

• monitoring in particular places, for example in prisons, in the courts, hospitals, children's homes, old age homes, particular areas of the environment;
• monitoring particular situations, for example, an election;
• monitoring specific rights abuses, for example, female circumcision, child labour.

International monitoring committees

Most international human rights conventions and treaties do not make provision for procedures for enforcing international human rights law. Most of them do, however, provide for committees to be established to monitor states' compliance with their treaty obligations as well as to receive complaints.

We look at the most important of these committees in the next section on 'Mechanisms for protecting and enforcing rights'.

Monitoring plays a critical part in the process of promoting human rights at all levels. If a situation involving an abuse of human rights has been monitored and reported at an international level it can have the effect of damaging the standing of that country in the eyes of the world. This often forces the government to make a stand or to change its ways.

It is quite clear that local human rights groups, NGOs and individuals play a very important role in monitoring human rights in their own countries and passing this information on to regional or international bodies.