A/HRC/27/47 I. Introduction 1. The International Court of Justice has stated that “wrongfully to deprive human beings of their freedom and to subject them to physical constraint in conditions of hardship is in itself manifestly incompatible with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, as well as with the fundamental principles enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.1 In 1991, the Commission on Human Rights established the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to investigate detention imposed arbitrarily and inconsistently with international standards in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and legal instruments accepted by the States concerned (E/CN.4/RES/1991/42). The Working Group is the only Charter-based (or non-treaty-based) mechanism whose mandate expressly provides for consideration of individual complaints. Its actions are based on the right of petition for individuals anywhere in the world. The opinions of the Working Group are reported to the Human Rights Council, which urges Member States to cooperate and comply with the Working Group and its opinions, and where States make statements about international and domestic law, and human rights obligations in conventions and customary international law, and their own and other States’ compliance with these. 2. The Human Rights Council, in its resolution 20/16, encourages all States to “respect and promote the right of anyone deprived of his or her liberty by arrest or detention to bring proceedings before court, in order that the court may decide without delay on the lawfulness of his or her detention and order his or her release if the detention is not lawful, in accordance with their international obligations” (A/HRC/RES/20/16, para. 6 (d)). The Council requested the Working Group to prepare, and to present to it before the end of 2015, draft basic principles and guidelines on remedies and procedures to assist Member States with their compliance (ibid., para. 10). 3. The Working Group was directed to seek the views of States, United Nations agencies, intergovernmental organizations, treaty bodies, particularly the Human Rights Committee, other special procedures, national human rights institutions, non-governmental organizations and other stakeholders. In 2013, the Working Group distributed a questionnaire on the treatment of the right to challenge the lawfulness of detention before court in the respective legal frameworks. It received responses from 44 States, 20 national human rights institutions, eight non-governmental organizations, five special procedures mandate holders, three regional entities and one of the treaty bodies. 4. The report is divided into three sections. The first section sets out the international human rights treaties, standards, and reports and jurisprudence of international mechanisms on the right to challenge the lawfulness of detention before court. The second section sets out the regional legal framework, including treaties, standards and jurisprudence of regional mechanisms relating to the right to challenge the lawfulness of detention before court. The third section, which constitutes the annex to the report, presents, in tabular format, national legal provisions relating to the right to a court review, as submitted by Member States to the Working Group. 5. The report does not attempt to be exhaustive in its citation of relevant legal instruments and jurisprudence but rather to show the general practice accepted as law in the international practice, representations by states and universal adoption of legal guarantees for the procedural right of anyone deprived of his or her liberty to challenge the lawfulness of his or her detention. 1 United States Diplomatic and Consular Staff in Tehran, Judgment, ICJ Reports 1980, p. 42. 3