A/HRC/41/30 reports, which are disseminated to the general public, government agencies and international organizations. 8. In their written contributions, national human rights institutions further highlight the importance of aligning human rights monitoring and reporting with the Sustainable Development Goals. In this regard, some mention their efforts to create tracking systems to bring together recommendations and observations by the international human rights system and the relevant Sustainable Development Goals, and to assess progress in their implementation. Some have also explored the link between the Goals and compliance by the business sector with the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework, and the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 9. Some of the challenges of engaging in the implementation, monitoring and measurement of the Sustainable Development Goals are: the perception that the Goals apply only at the international level; the low level of stakeholders’ awareness and understanding of the Goals, of the relevance of human rights and of the interconnection between the Goals and the human rights agenda; the lack of formal status for national human rights institutions at the high-level political forum on sustainable development 2 and the need for a more transparent process for engagement in the voluntary national reviews;3 the lack of resources, capacity and expertise of national human rights institutions to fully include the Sustainable Development Goal agenda in their work plans; the lack of knowledge of how to link recommendations from international human rights mechanisms with Sustainable Development Goal indicators; the lack of contextualized indicators for certain targets, while for others there are too many, making monitoring and data collection difficult; the existence of elements that can distort statistics, such as the geographical and social imbalance of complaints received by national human rights institutions, and the fact that not all violations are reported to them. 10. In their written submissions, some national human rights institutions make recommendations to be implemented at the national level. These include: • Expanding, improving and coordinating the collection of statistics and new indicators in collaboration with national statistics offices; • Building capacity, cooperating and exchanging peer to peer on the methodology to be used for linking human rights and Sustainable Development Goals; • National human rights institutions developing methodologies and tools for data collection, disaggregation and dissemination; • Identifying the information required by national human rights institutions to evaluate human rights policies; • Government authorities, academia and research centres granting access to information to enable national human rights institutions to better formulate Sustainable Development Goal indicators from a human rights perspective. III. Summary 11. The consultation took place in the morning of 7 March 2019. Opening statements were made by a representative of OHCHR, the Permanent Representative of Australia to 2 3 4 The high-level political forum on sustainable development is the main United Nations platform on sustainable development and has a central role in the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals at the global level. See https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/hlpf. The 2030 Agenda encourages States to “conduct regular and inclusive reviews of progress at the national and subnational levels which are country-led and country-driven”. These national reviews are expected to serve as a basis for the regular reviews by the high-level political forum on sustainable development. See https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/vnrs/.