A/HRC/4/55 page 2 Activities relating to the implementation of the right to development 1. In accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 1/4 of 30 June 2006, which endorsed the recommendations of the seventh session of the Working Group on the Right to Development, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights undertook preparations for the implementation of the recommendations and for the third session of the high-level task force on the implementation of the right to development. 2. The mandate of the task force was to apply the criteria for periodic evaluation of global development partnerships - as identified on Millennium Development Goal 8 (MDG 8) - from the perspective of the right to development, on a pilot basis, to selected partnerships, with a view to operationalizing and progressively developing these criteria, and thus contributing to mainstreaming the right to development in the policies and operational activities of relevant actors at the national, regional and international levels, including multilateral financial, trade and development institutions (see E/CN.4/2006/26, para. 77). 3. The third session of the task force took place from 22 to 26 January 2007 in Geneva, at which a dialogue took place between the expert members of the task force, representatives of institutional members of the task force, and representatives of the organizations involved in the above-mentioned partnerships. Member States observers also participated in the rich and fruitful discussions of the meeting. 4. The three partnerships selected for an initial assessment by the task force were the following: the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM); the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA)/Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) Mutual Review of Development Effectiveness in the context of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD); and the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. 5. In line with the practical and action-oriented approach adopted by the Working Group on the Right to Development in recent years, the task force deemed it important to ensure that the implementation of the right to development be supported by an operational framework that is conceptually and methodologically rigorous. Furthermore, building upon comparative experiences in the implementation of other partnerships and their monitoring mechanisms - to the extent of legitimate overlap with the above criteria - will help avoid having application of these criteria “reinvent the wheel”. The exercise of piloting the criteria would also contribute to revealing the distinctive attributes brought by the right to development, in a practical sense. 6. In addition to an initial assessment of the three partnerships above, the task force concluded that the right to development framework has value-added for the partnerships it reviewed, and that continued refinement and application of the criteria could make significant contributions to the current and future partnerships, and might possibly inspire them to explicitly factor essential elements of the right to development into their respective operational frameworks. To this end, the task force suggested that additional development partnerships, within the scope of MDG 8, be considered.