A/HRC/15/56 (ii) In addition, the possibility of sending urgent joint appeals to States on individual cases where an individual or a group of individuals are in danger of suffering an irreparable damage was also mentioned. For example, the United Nations, the Inter-American and the African rapporteurs, as well as the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights and the OSCE focal point on human rights defenders could put in place a system that would allow for cases of violations of human rights in their respective regions to be shared. This information sharing could be facilitated by the secretariats of human rights mechanisms through desk-to-desk cooperation, with the participation of NGOs, which in many cases are the source of information. (d) Universal periodic review (i) Regional mechanisms provide written contributions to the to the UPR process. In this regard, it was proposed that based on existing good practices of contributions by the Council of Europe and the Inter-American human rights system, documents from the regional human rights mechanisms be increasingly submitted as official documents to the Human Rights Council; (ii) Furthermore, participants agreed on the advantages that would be implied by the reciprocal use of recommendations issued by both the UPR and regional human rights mechanisms. For instance, the UPR can refer to the non-implementation of decisions or recommendations of regional human rights mechanisms and vice versa. This would contribute to reinforcing the effectiveness of all human rights mechanisms; (iii) It was also proposed that, in view of the similarity between the UPR and the African Peer Review Mechanism, systematic channels of cooperation and exchange of information be established between them. 2. Joint activities 46. During the workshop it was established that some joint activities of regional and international human rights mechanisms are already in place. Nonetheless, it was also demonstrated that many practical difficulties still exist. For example, many of these initiatives remain isolated and often depend on favourable circumstances. In addition, cumbersome bureaucratic procedures may hamper and even stifle cooperation. Therefore, it is necessary to systematize joint activities in order to achieve better results. Participants identified some areas in which joint activities between international and human rights mechanisms could be implemented. (a) Country visits (i) On a case-by-case basis, independent experts from international and regional human rights mechanisms should consider conducting joint visits on a more frequent basis, so as to optimize efforts by generating more visibility and giving greater weight to their recommendations. It was recommended that best practices and lessons learned from joint visits already conducted be taken into account, e.g. the joint visit to Togo (2008) by the United Nations and ACHPR rapporteurs on human rights defenders, and visits that will be undertaken in the near future, e.g. the upcoming joint visit to Mexico (August 2010) of the United Nations and IACHR rapporteurs on freedom of expression; (ii) Participants proposed that long-term planning of visits is established, including a list of visits that will be conducted by the various human rights mechanisms over a six- month period. This would facilitate the exchange of 12