68 Trial Monitoring: A Reference Manual for Practitioners Example of instructions on minimum monitoring obligations96 “Monitoring obligations: Monitors are expected to monitor at least two court hearings per week…. Monitors must carry out their responsibilities in pairs. Each monitor should keep her/his own notes, but each team will work together to prepare and submit a single report to the national co-ordinator. Any report prepared by one monitor will not be accepted unless the monitor has obtained prior approval…. The report to be submitted…shall be in the form of an appropriately completed checklist…. The checklist will have to be submitted in completed form within two days after the date when the hearing was monitored. In addition to the checklist report, monitors will also have to prepare and submit a narrative report on a monthly basis. This report will have to be submitted by each monitor individually. It should contain a summary of the most frequent procedural violations observed by the monitor during that month, as well as any other pertinent information that was not fully reflected in the checklist-report.” 8.3 Legal reference materials 96 Legal reference materials, including legal codes, secondary sources of law, commentaries and legal articles, are essential to the monitoring and analytical capacity of programme staff. It may be difficult for individual monitors to obtain these on their own, so the programme should acquire and make available to its staff all possible legal reference materials. Managers should also consider the usefulness of developing a legal reference manual. 8.3.1 Considerations regarding legal reference materials Legal reference materials made accessible to monitoring staff should include: • copies of international and regional fair trial standards and relevant case-law, including secondary reference materials, such as commentaries and compilations of jurisprudence. Of particular relevance is ODIHR’s Legal Digest of International Fair Trial Rights,97 which is the companion volume to this manual;98 • copies of the domestic procedural and criminal codes applicable to the cases that will be monitored; codes on civil and administrative proceedings if these are to be followed; and domestic legal commentaries on the codes, if they exist; • landmark domestic jurisprudence by higher courts; • copies of administrative laws relevant to monitoring, including laws regulating the posting of case schedules, regulations on the functioning of courts and codes of ethics for legal professionals; • information – e.g., brochures or an organization chart – on the domestic legal system, including on the organizational and jurisdictional structure of the courts, prosecutors’ offices and of other relevant organs, such as bar associations; • other materials, articles and reports on relevant legal issues or practices published by international and national organizations. This includes subscribing to local legal periodicals and obtaining relevant reports and documents of other OSCE trial-monitoring programmes; and • a list of websites where legal reference materials of hard and soft law may be accessed, including case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Since many of these materials will also be known to local legal professionals, making them accessible to monitoring staff enables a programme to have common points of reference with justice professionals. Monitoring programmes can, therefore, use standards familiar to the recipients of their reports. Moreover, having access to these materials enables monitoring staff to identify any 96  See “Sample guidelines for monitors” in Annex I. B. 97  ODIHR, Legal Digest of International Fair Trial Rights, op. cit., note 2. A list of other sources for substantive standards is included in Annex VII. 98  Many other relevant documents exist; a selection is included in Annex VII.