A/HRC/32/43 VI. Middle East and North Africa region 36. The fifth and last consultation, for the Middle East and North Africa Region, was convened by the Independent Expert on 11 and 12 January 2016 in Doha. Participants from Asia who had been unable to join the Asia-Pacific consultation were also invited to attend. There were 33 participants, including representatives of 11 States, the National Human Rights Council of Morocco, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights and the Indonesian national commission for human rights, as well as United Nations experts and representatives of OHCHR and civil society, including academia and non-governmental organizations. 37. In giving welcoming remarks, the chief of the Middle-East and North Africa Branch of OHCHR underscored how the consultation presented a good opportunity to address the conceptual and practical challenges of international solidarity, a principle that underpinned many international provisions, including human rights law. 38. Opening remarks were made by the Director of the Human Rights Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Qatar. He highlighted that, in the spirit of the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, according to which no one should be left behind, the foreign policy of Qatar was aimed at advancing international cooperation for the realization of global peace and security, as well as enhancing development through a human-rights-based approach. A. Panel presentations and discussion on human rights and international solidarity 39. The presentations of the first panel addressed the existing legal framework on human rights and international solidarity; international cooperation for the realization of human rights and the extraterritorial obligations of States in the field of human rights; international sustainable development law and the principle of international solidarity; and international solidarity and its role in the work of regional human rights mechanisms. 40. In the presentations, international human rights law was once again revisited in the context of the place of international solidarity in today’s global challenges. It was said that solidarity had evolved positively over time, away from a purely individual and charitable perspective into an explicitly recognized and valued element of social cohesion at the national level. The difficulty of putting solidarity into practice at the international level did not derive from the lack of a legal framework but rather from a limited understanding of the need and the potential of international solidarity for all countries, and the lack of political will on the part of States to undertake all measures necessary to make human rights a reality for the everyday lives of everyday people. Yet, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had set out for the first time that fundamental human rights were to be universally protected and that everyone was entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration could be fully realized. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in which a number of those rights had been codified, required States parties to achieve progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the Covenant by all appropriate means, including in particular the adoption of legislative measures. International human rights law was not the sole source of the extraterritorial obligations of States and their constituent parts. Looking at international norms as an integrated system, one found multiple sources of legal regimes that supported the notion of an obligation to govern cross-border relationships in a way that was consistent with international law and world order. From those could be inferred a right borne by all, in particular victims of gross human rights violations, to effective countermeasures. Local governments had developed practices in the exercise of their extraterritorial obligations 15