In the meantime, treaty body members have struggled to preserve their independent expert status in a highly politicized UN environment, which has populated their numbers with many government surrogates and grossly underfinanced their work. The reforms envisaged in this Report have assumed that improvements not requiring formal amendment will be more easily accomplished. The proposals for bolstering national level partnerships are also made in the context of the current conditions of overlap and a multiplicity of treaty bodies. Follow-up is the key missing component of the implementation regime, and therefore recommendations in this context are developed at some length. Ultimately, the human rights treaty system will remain inefficient and inadequate in the absence of consolidation of the treaty bodies.
Some limited amendment is, therefore, unavoidable.
The treaty bodies cannot handle in a timely manner the number of reports which the system now requires or produces, even if there was a general amnesty - which in practice is now the case. The average consideration by each treaty body of a state for six or seven hours once every five years has not maximized constructive interaction. Six different working methods, documents, practices, rules of procedure, and reporting guidelines do not serve users. There is substantive overlap of treaty rights and freedoms, and inevitable overlap of reporting and dialogue. Examination of a single state in light of all human rights information, encourages a coherent understanding of problems and needs.