A/HRC/43/37 They also conducted a mission to New York from 10 to 14 June 2019, during which they met with members of the Security Council, the President of the General Assembly and some of its members, the President of the Economic and Social Council, States, the Secretary-General, departments of the Secretariat, other United Nations agencies, the World Bank and civil society organizations. C. Preliminary considerations 7. “Prevention” is a term with many meanings. Discussions about prevention within the United Nations tend to leave the term undefined, or to concentrate most often on the prevention of conflict, including the role of the international community in crises. This makes States apprehensive, fearing that prevention is a pretext to intervene in their internal affairs. The rapporteurs wish to emphasize that the perception that prevention may threaten in any way national sovereignty often stems from discussions that turn on abstract and largely undefined terms. This impression would, to a large extent, be dispelled by concentrating on specific preventive policies and programmes. 8. The bulk of preventive work, including when technical assistance is provided by the international community, takes place at the national level, on the initiative and under the direction of national authorities. The majority of programmes that are effective for the prevention of human rights violations involve the design and implementation of policies that are the prerogative and in the interests of the States concerned. When States carry out preventive work in order to comply with the international obligation to do so, this should not be viewed as a purely external constraint, but rather as compliance with an international obligation voluntarily adhered to by the State concerned. Furthermore, international law intentionally leaves States broad latitude to define how, concretely, they satisfy their international obligations through the design and implementation of policies at the national level. 9. Similarly, the rapporteurs would like to emphasize the importance of the emerging consensus about widening and “upstreaming” preventive work. The fact that most discussions about prevention concentrate on crisis prevention, early warning and early action, as important as these are, reinforces apprehension about interventionism. The need for early warning and early action always implies that preventive work was not effective or did not occur in the first place. Prevention, to be effective, requires a long-term approach based on the identification of the root causes of crises, which, if not tackled, may lead to human rights emergencies or conflicts. These causes include factors such as various forms of discrimination or a lack of access to justice and lack of enjoyment of socioeconomic rights. Prevention should not be restricted to operational prevention, aimed at averting specific threats of human rights violations or de-escalating ongoing violations. It should also include structural prevention, which is meant to unlock systemic violations and reduce the long-term likelihood of violations. 10. Furthermore, as highlighted by the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, prevention needs not only to be upstreamed, but tackled in a more systematic way (see A/72/523 and A/HRC/37/65). Over time, vast knowledge and expertise have been gained about prevention. The greatest obstacles to progress in this area are, from a practical standpoint, poor investments and weak commitments, and, from an epistemic standpoint, not so much a dearth of knowledge but its disaggregation and “siloization”. The thick disciplinary lines characteristic of thinking on prevention, accompanied by institutional fragmentation of work in the area, and the prioritization of emergency interventions have led to the sidelining of issues that are clearly relevant for prevention and about which significant expertise has been accumulated. These issues consist of policies, often taken on the initiative of States, that remain under their control and responsibility and that transcend the timespan of crisis prevention. 11. Finally, it is important to recall that, although the idea of rights as claims-raising mechanisms is their most salient dimension, and certainly a crucial one, human rights were originally designed not merely as redress mechanisms (that is, as means of ex post reactions to violations), but more as protective measures (to avoid ex ante harms). Yet, the way in which human rights resolve general problems before they arise, by building trust in State institutions, consolidating general interests and enabling forms of community, is often elided. This makes discussions about the role of human rights in prevention almost a non3