A/HRC/15/17
Division’s provision of documentation and summary record services, and proposed
comprehensive measures to address those shortfalls. The Council accordingly adopted
decision 9/103 on 24 September 2008, in which it requested, inter alia, the SecretaryGeneral to present to the General Assembly a report with details of the resources required
to ensure the provision of necessary services indicated in the report of the Office of the
High Commissioner (A/HRC/9/18).
3.
The decisions of the Council from its ninth session were included in its report
submitted to the General Assembly (A/63/53/Add.1), which was taken up by the Third
Committee at its sixty-third session. A statement of programme budget implications
(A/C.3/63/L.77) detailing the resource requirements as proposed in the OHCHR report
(A/HRC/9/18) was submitted to the Committee in respect of its consideration of a draft
resolution endorsing the Council decisions. Specifically, additional requirements of
$6,137,700 for the remainder of the biennium 2008-2009, and $16,819,400 for the biennium
2010-2011, were identified. However, the Assembly eventually adopted resolution 63/160
with revised wording that “took note” of the report of the Council rather than endorsed it.
Consequently, the related statement of programme budget implications was withdrawn. On
10 December 2008, the requirements in the withdrawn statement were reported to Member
States for information only in an annex to the report of the Secretary-General on revised
estimates resulting from the resolutions and decisions adopted by the Council at its ninth
session (A/63/541/Add. 1, annex II).
4.
In the absence of additional resources to support the greatly increased
documentation workload associated with the evolution of the Council and the establishment
of its universal periodic review process, the Secretariat endeavoured to utilize existing
resources to support the Council as efficiently as possible. Without specific resources for
the universal periodic review process, it was informally agreed to prioritize the processing
of review documentation before considering the processing of summary records of the
Council and its Advisory Committee for the period 2008-2009. Some document processing
was also completed in New York, including translation of the report of the United Nations
Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (A/HRC/12/48) and the processing of a
summary record backlog of 5 million words. In its report, the Advisory Committee for
Administrative and Budgetary Questions noted that the net 2008-2009 workload estimate,
which excluded 10.2 million words of summary records of the proceedings of the Council
and its subsidiary bodies that were not drafted, as informally agreed by the Council,
amounted to 66.7 million words, or an increase of 27 per cent over the workload for the
biennium 2006-2007.1 These increases, which included concurrent and continuing growth in
documentation requirements for an expanding number of human rights treaty bodies, are
indicated in the table below:
1
2
Official Records of the General Assembly, Sixty-fourth Session, Supplement No. 7 (A/64/7), chap. II,
part I, para. I. 85.
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