REPORTING TO THE UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS TREATY BODIES TRAINING GUIDE: Part I — Manual and impartiality of members of the human rights Treaty Bodies (“Addis Ababa Guidelines”)11, stipulating further safeguards for the independence and impartiality of Treaty Body members. The members are elected at the meeting of the State parties to the respective treaty. They are elected for a four-year term. To ensure continuity in membership, elections are staggered – the State parties hold elections for one-half of the membership every two years. Treaty Body members do not receive a salary for their work. The United Nations pays the travel costs of members and a daily subsistence allowance to cover their costs (accommodation, board, local transport) during the session. 1.3.2. Functions The Treaty Bodies are mandated in the respective treaties or optional protocols to undertake a number of functions to monitor treaty implementation, namely to review State parties’ reports; to consider complaints from individuals; or to conduct inquiries and country visits. They also undertake other functions, namely responding to requests for urgent action, elaborating general comments or reviewing inter-State complaints. How these functions are performed is also elaborated in the treaties or optional protocols, and further specified in the rules of procedure and working methods of each Treaty Body. Not all Treaty Bodies perform all of the above functions; a summary of each Treaty Body function is detailed below. Recent developments in exercising their functions are outlined in each Committee’s annual report to the United Nations General Assembly. The main functions are the following: a) Review of State parties’ reports: all Treaty Bodies except the SPT are mandated to consider reports which State parties are obliged to submit periodically on steps taken to implement the provisions of the relevant treaty and any difficulties encountered in that regard. In the case of the CRC, its mandate also includes the substantive optional protocols of the Convention, namely on the ‘Sale of Children’ and on ‘Children and Armed Conflict’. This means that the number of reports a State is required to submit periodically will depend on the number of international human rights treaties to which that particular State is a party. The Treaty Bodies review these reports, identify issues of concern and make recommendations in what are known as “concluding observations”. The reporting procedure will be extensively explained in the following chapters of this Training Guide. b) Consideration of complaints from individuals: all Treaty Bodies apart from the SPT are entitled to receive and consider complaints (known as “communications”) from individuals (or groups of individuals) alleging that their rights under a treaty have been violated by a State party to that treaty. The CMW is the only Treaty Body of which the mandate to consider individual communications is not yet operative.12 The individual communication procedure is optional, which means that the State party to a treaty of which a violation is alleged must have expressly recognized the competence of the Treaty Body to receive and consider complaints from individuals under its jurisdiction. Such competence is recognized either through a declaration pertaining to a specific provision of the treaty (ICERD, 11 A/67/222 10 12 It will come into force when ten States Parties have declared that they recognize the competence of the Committee to receive and consider communications (under article 77 of the Convention on Migrant Workers).