The Reporting Procedure
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Initial treaty-specific reports should focus on providing information relating to implementation
of each of the rights (i.e., all substantive provisions) covered by the treaty concerned, including
information on the State’s constitutional and legal framework that is not provided in the common core
document, as well as the legal and practical measures adopted to implement the treaty. It should
contain an explanation, for example, of how a particular right is protected by national legislation,
of which policies are in place to implement it, and of the types of mechanisms in place to monitor
implementation of the right.
Periodic treaty-specific reports should in particular include recent developments affecting full
realization of the rights recognized in the treaty, as well as information on measures taken and
progress achieved to follow-up and implement the recommendations issued by the specific Treaty
Body during the last consideration of the State party.
Periodic treaty-specific reports submitted under the Simplified Reporting Procedure should correspond
to the List of Issues Prior to Reporting sent beforehand to State parties (see Section 4.3 on the SRP).
It is possible to include annexes in support of information contained in treaty-specific reports. States
may wish to submit separately, as annexes and in a working language of the relevant committee,
copies of the principal legislative, judicial, administrative and other documents such as statistics and
texts referred to in the reports. As such they should not contain new or key information as this type
of information should be included in the treaty-specific report. Annexes should be referenced in the
report (e.g., Table 2 in Annex 1).
State parties should bear in mind that in principal annexes do not count against the word limit but
are also not translated. Attention needs to be paid to finding the right balance between relevance
and the length and number of annexes. For example, instead of including a 200-page piece of
legislation (for example the entire Criminal Code), the annex may only contain the relevant provision
from the legislation (for example an excerpt from the law relating to the prohibition of torture).
In 2017 CEDAW decided to inform State parties to the Convention that annexes to State party
documentation submitted to the Committee should not exceed 8,000 words in the case of common
core documents, 6,000 words in the case of initial reports, 4,000 words in the case of periodic
reports, and 2,000 words in the case of written replies to lists of issues and questions.
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