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Appendix Covenants on Human Rights: Drafting Procedures and Timeline During the time period covered in Chapters 4–6, the U.N. calendar was based on the convening of the General Assembly in the fall of any particular year. This meant that the work of the main bodies of the U.N. and their subsidiaries—in this case, the Economic and Social Council and the Commission on Human Rights—needed to be completed in advance of the opening session of the General Assembly. The Commission on Human Rights would meet during the spring, their sessions lasting between six and eight weeks. At the end of the session, the Commission would adopt a report of the session, including draft resolutions for consideration by the Economic and Social Council, the Commission’s parent body. It would also forward summary proceedings from the session and, most important, the text of the draft Covenant on Human Rights as it stood at the end of the session. It also included other proposals that had been introduced but not discussed or adopted—draft articles, measures of implementation, proposals for oversight bodies, and so forth. Often the Commission would draft resolutions asking the General Assembly for approval of its work and to recommend a course of action for the following year. These would be taken up by the Economic and Social Council, which might adopt them relatively unchanged or draft alternatives . This would be the case in 1950. During this time, the Economic and Social Council met twice annually . At its first session, the Council would transmit whatever directives had been determined at the previous session of the General Assembly to the Commission before the Commission convened in March or April. The Council would then consider the work completed by the Commission at their second annual session held during the summer, in advance of the convening of the General Assembly in the fall. Upon receiving the report of Economic and Social Council, the Assembly would send it to its Third Committee, dealing with Humanitar- 216 Appendix ian, Social and Cultural affairs, for discussion. This is where all the drafting work of General Assembly resolutions takes place. For each substantive agenda item under consideration, the Third Committee would open with a general debate and later move on to the drafting of resolutions sponsored singly or jointly by the several delegations on the Committee . For any draft resolution being discussed, delegations might seek to amend drafts under discussion or offer full alternative resolutions. In the case of competing resolutions, the Committee would typically choose one resolution to serve as the basis of discussions. Delegations offering alternatives would then have to attempt to have their views expressed through an amendment process. In some extreme cases, individual votes would be taken on something as minor as the substitution of a semicolon for a comma. Lengthy resolutions might be cobbled together after several rounds of voting on amended language, phrases, or sentences, by paragraph and by section. A final vote on the entire draft resolution would then be taken. If adopted, the draft would be sent to the plenary of the General Assembly for its final consideration. One last note on procedure is worth pointing out in some detail. During the drafting of the Covenants, the General Assembly would often instruct the Commission on Human Rights (through the Economic and Social Council) to take into consideration the views of Member States and various specialized agencies on the draft Covenant. This introduced another level of review into the process. In the various resolutions adopted by the General Assembly on the Covenants from 1948 to 1952, the Secretary-General would instruct Member States to forward comments to the Secretariat, which would then compile them in a report and transmit them to the Economic and Social Council, which would forward them to the Commission. Thus, at many points during this period , the Commission would have to consider (1) the actual draft before them; (2) the instructions of the General Assembly, including (3) the views expressed during sessions of the Third Committee and the General Assembly plenary, and (4) the views of Member States and the specialized agencies received post-resolution. One reason the Commission was able to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights so quickly in 1947–48 (as Morsink points out) was that the Commission met four times during this period, rather than twice, and was able to secure the views of governments during the drafting process directly, without taking the drafts through the...

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