covenants and treaties. Domestic monitoring groups may have to register and comply with national legislation governing domestic organizations. The resources available to a programme will also impact the programme’s potential scale and duration and therefore impact its ability to meet its declared aims. Decisions regarding scale may be restricted by resources, as programmes requiring a large number of geographically dispersed monitors will be more expensive than a smaller monitoring team covering a few specifically designated courts. 2.3 Anticipating operational issues In order to determine the anticipated scale and duration of a programme, a preliminary assessment should also seek to evaluate the operational implications of a programme’s proposed aims and focus. Access issues must also be identified and evaluated during a preliminary assessment to determine the feasibility of a particular monitoring focus. While it is not required that an organization choose a model or select a monitoring methodology during the assessment, generally anticipating scale, duration, and access issues will allow an organizer to avoid proposing aims that are not operationally feasible. 2.3.1 Programme scale and duration The aims and focus of monitoring have direct implications for both the scale and duration of a programme’s operation that must be considered in a preliminary assessment. In particular, the focus of the programme will dictate the types and number of cases that will be monitored. This will have implications for the number and location of courts to be monitored, the number of cases or hearings to be monitored, as well as the duration of monitoring operations. These issues have practical consequences for the geographic reach of a programme, the number of monitors that will be needed for operations, and consequently the number of staff and size of operations more generally. OSCE programmes have alternatively sought to staff monitors to cover a large number of representative courts throughout a host state, assigned monitors to cover priority cases wherever they arise, or staffed monitors only in courts having jurisdiction for specific types of cases. Project programmes have also engaged a surplus of monitors for the purpose of training and capacity-building.5 Depending on their aims and focus, OSCE programmes have ranged greatly in size, employing anywhere from six to twenty-five monitors. In turn, programmes will have to employ supervisory and other staff consistent with anticipated information management and reporting requirements (see Chapter 4, “Programme structure and staffing issues”). The timing and duration of monitoring efforts will also follow upon a programme’s aims. For instance, programmes will have to assess the length of time it will take to monitor enough cases before findings and conclusions related to the programme’s focus are able to be made. Again, this may depend on the number of monitors, as well as the monitoring methodology. A programme’s aims will also determine whether a 5  Project programmes, as one of two basic institutional models through which to organize a programme, are discussed further in Chapter 3.2. 30 Trial-Monitoring: A Reference Manual for Practitioners