Washington, D.C., find their way into the policies and practices of states. To that end, the Justice Initiative published in 2010 a report called “From Judgment to Justice,”20 which sought to take measure of the degree to which states comply with decisions issued by regional human rights courts and UN treaty bodies and the various follow-up procedures that exist to oversee their execution. The overriding conclusion was that, while these systems vary in sophistication and scale, they all confront, to varying degrees, an implementation deficit that needs to be taken seriously. Racial Discrimination] has adopted final decisions on the merits in the same number, finding violations in eleven, three of which the committee has determined were satisfactorily implemented.24 Comparatively, then, CAT is doing quite well, even if a sixty percent compliance rate is itself a sobering statistic. Structure and Implementation by UN Treaty Bodies At present, all treaty bodies that are empowered to receive individual communications have also instituted follow-up procedures. The Human Rights Committee was the first body to do so when, in 1990, it created the position of Special Rapporteur for Follow-Up on Views, with a two-year renewable mandate to monitor state implementation of decisions. In 2002, the Committee Against Torture also designated a rapporteur for follow-up to Article 22 decisions. According to the terms of reference for follow-up rapporteurs, their mandate includes, in theory, the following activities: 1) monitoring compliance with Committee decisions, which entails communicating with States Parties to inquire about what measures they have taken or intend to take to execute the decision; 2) recommending appropriate action States Parties might take to satisfy the terms of a decision; 3) meeting with representatives of permanent missions of States Parties to encourage compliance; 4) determining where technical assistance by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights would be appropriate; and 5) conducting (again, theoretically) follow-up visits in-country.25 Remedies for individuals, and general reforms to policy or institutional practice, are not easily won, even in domestic jurisdictions, and so pursuing such litigation in international and regional fora might strike some as fanciful. Perhaps such skepticism does not extend to the people gathered here today but it must be said that these systems are relatively new, they have fewer resources, and they rest on less-settled juridical foundations than their domestic counterparts. These are all very compelling reasons why implementation is challenging, to say nothing of the nuisance such decisions pose to governments, who might otherwise carry out human rights abuses unchecked by the judgment of an independent body. Successes of the Committee against Torture In spite of these obstacles, the number of cases filed and decisions delivered by these bodies, including the Committee against Torture, continues to increase. According to the CAT’s most recent report, since 1989 the Committee has registered 506 complaints against 31 States Parties.21 Of those, the Committee has adopted final decisions on the merits in 203 complaints and found violations in 73 of them. A total of 102 complaints remain pending for consideration, a backlog that has continued to grow. These numbers also track an increase in communications procedures throughout the UN treaty body system. Presently, four other committees can receive communications, and two more—the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights—have procedures that have recently, or will soon, come into effect. Let me take a few minutes to provide some more figures and, for those who are unfamiliar, sketch out how UN treaty bodies generally seek to support the implementation of their decisions. I will then turn to the challenges and opportunities that exist with respect to implementation at the national level. Generally speaking, states are expected to reply to a committee’s decision within six months, explaining how they intend to implement a remedial scheme. However, many states do not reply, and many that do often take the opportunity to contest the factual basis of the committee’s decision or to challenge its interpretation of the respective convention. Unfortunately, as it is true of the international human rights regime more generally, there are few sanctions available to the committee when states fail to comply. Naming and shaming is one option, of course, but the only public information that is kept on these cases and the status of their implementation is, to my knowledge, found in the annual report that each treaty body presents to the General Assembly. So, to our earlier conversation about the importance of publicity, this tool is used far less effectively than it could be. I want to add one caveat here: the figures I am offering reflect the assessments of the treaty bodies and follow-up rapporteurs themselves, with which reasonable minds may very well disagree. Indeed, the Justice Initiative recently experienced this in the context of an ethnic profiling case it helped litigate before the Human Rights Committee against Spain.26 There were manifest deficiencies in the government’s response and our follow-up letters received no substantive reply, so it was with some surprise that we later learned, only by happening to read a newsletter of the OHCHR Treaties Division, that the case had actually been closed and in fact publicized as an example of successful implementation. That offers some picture into the struggles that victims and their representatives face, just at the level of communicating with the UN secretariat in Geneva. It is worth noting that CAT decisions enjoy the highest compliance rate: nearly sixty percent as compared to other treaty bodies. It is also the only other treaty body to have adjudicated a relatively large number of communications. The largest, by far, is the Human Rights Committee, which, according to its most recent figures, has adjudicated 914 cases to date;22 however, the compliance rate with those decisions is significantly lower than CAT’s. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has registered about 30 communications to date,23 and CERD [Convention on the Elimination of 27