A/HRC/7/28 page 16 55. Country visits open opportunities to establish direct contacts with institutions and organizations, which allows the Special Representative to make more targeted interventions after the visit. Similarly, county visits allow defenders to learn about the mandate and how to access it. The Special Representative consistently remarked significant improvements in the flow of information to and from a country after a mission. This in itself is a positive outcome of a visit and constitutes a channel to monitor the situation of human rights defenders and the level of implementation of recommendations. 56. Like other mandate-holders, the Special Representative used questionnaires to request information on achievements and challenges in the implementation of her country-based recommendations. She did so for her report to the Commission on Human Rights at its sixty-second session (E/CN.4/2006/95/Add.5), which focused on developments in the implementation of the Declaration. All the 11 countries visited by the Special Representative11 are among the 118 countries that are profiled in that report. Country reports were used as major references to assess progress and identify challenges and concerns. It is interesting to note that in all the countries which she had visited, at least one stakeholder responded to the questionnaire and for six of them, responses were received by the Government, civil society organizations and/or the UNCT. Even more remarkable was the rate of Government replies to the questionnaire: 64 per cent from countries that had received a visit of the Special Representative, while the average for the 118 countries reviewed in the report was 30 per cent. This clearly indicates a higher level of responsiveness of stakeholders in countries visited by the Special Representative, particularly among Governments. 57. The Special Representative carried out two follow-up missions, the first one being to Colombia in 2004, three years after her country visit. Although carried out in agreement with the Government, the follow-up mission to Colombia was not a fully-fledged country visit and did not have a dedicated report. Nevertheless, the two-day mission allowed gathering new first-hand information which was reported as an update in the 2005 communications report (E/CN.4/2005/101/Add.1, paras. 203-216). In November 2007, the Special Representative was informed that the report on her country visit in 2002 (E/CN.4/2002/106/Add.2) was being used as evidence in a case currently pending before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. This is a good example of how other stakeholders, in this case a regional human rights mechanism, can use country visit reports. 58. The second follow-up mission was an official country visit undertaken to The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in September 2007, four years after the country visit. The report on the visit undertaken in 2004 (E/CN.4/2004/94/Add.2) was used as the basis to assess progress and gaps in the subsequent four years. To facilitate the assessment, a matrix was prepared containing a list of over 60 issues, findings and recommendations detailed in a schematic manner. For each item, information on developments that had occurred between 2003 and 2007 was sought before and during the mission. This allowed immediately identifying areas 11 As specified above, the overall number of countries visited by the Special Representative is 13. They were 11 in 2006, when the report referred to was issued.