A/HRC/4/43 page 8 IV. FOLLOW-UP TO THE ACTIVITIES OF MANDATE-HOLDERS AND COMMUNICATION STRATEGY 29. Under this agenda item, participants addressed the issues of follow-up to their activities and of a strengthened communication strategy. Discussions were based on recommendations adopted by the twelfth annual meeting. 30. The Secretariat briefed participants on efforts undertaken to improve the communication strategy, including through the establishment of a Communication Section at OHCHR. Efforts to increase awareness of special procedures’ activities were directly linked to the promotion of follow-up, through ensuring that special procedures’ output are known and available to key players and are used as advocacy and programming tools. In this respect the Secretariat had been working on a number of initiatives. They included the preparation of country analysis and trends based on the activities of all special procedures to feed into the overall OHCHR country engagement strategy; the preparation of thematic trends and statistics for internal analysis, as well as circulation to partners in the field; the preparation and circulation among mandate-holders and OHCHR staff of weekly briefing notes on the activities of mandate-holders and monthly bulletin and statistics on communications, as well as “success stories”; the preparation of quarterly bulletins, posted on the OHCHR website and distributed to a network of partners, on the activities of mandate-holders. The Office was also working on a training module for different partners, including OHCHR staff, and United Nations partners; NGOs; professional groups with the objective to build capacities to cooperate with the special procedures system. OHCHR maintained websites for special procedures as a system and for each mandate-holder. A. Communications strategy 31. Participants emphasized the need to ensure broad circulation of press releases, as well as the desirability of having interviews with United Nations radio services during country missions to make their findings widely known. It was pointed out that it would be useful to assess the extent to which the work of special procedures was covered by the media. The need to ensure that the information on the findings of visits filters down to the rights-holders was raised, as well as the need to ensure that country visit reports, as soon as available, are broadly circulated to all partners and key players at the national level. Some good practices were reported in this regard, including Governments’ cooperation in translating reports into national languages and ensuring dissemination through various channels. 32. In order to make the website more informative, it was suggested that the information included in the internal analytical tools developed by the Secretariat be posted on the web. It was suggested that a medium-term study be undertaken by OHCHR to envisage ways to make the wealth of information produced by special procedures more easily accessible. 33. In order to ensure that the mandate-holders can always be reached by relevant partners it was suggested that general e-mail addresses should be created for each mandate. It was also suggested that access should be given to such accounts to mandate-holders in order to allow them to be more closely involved in the communications with partners.

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