A/HRC/12/41 page 6 State and its institutions to respect these standards. Ultimately, the programme seeks to assist the Cambodian Government to build an institutional framework which will allow Cambodians to obtain an effective remedy for violations of their rights - something which for most of them is still lacking. 1. Promotion of international treaty standards 18. OHCHR has assisted the Government in meeting its existing treaty obligations and has encouraged it to ratify new treaties. The 2009 legislative programme includes a law to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. OHCHR translated and published the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Khmer within weeks of its adoption in December 2008. 19. The 2007 Constitutional Council ruling clarifying the status of treaties in Cambodian domestic law, which OHCHR was instrumental in promoting, has had a positive impact. On the issue of sentencing of juveniles which the Council had been asked to address, research by the Centre for Social Development found that most judges were complying with the ruling when sentencing juveniles - an important positive shift. OHCHR co-sponsored a series of workshops organized by the Ministry of Justice and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), aimed in part at raising awareness of the Council decision amongst judges and legal practitioners. OHCHR published a compilation entitled “Cambodian Human Rights Law”, which collected the declaration of human rights in the Constitution, the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords related to human rights and Khmer translations of the core human rights treaties to which Cambodia is a party. The book includes the text of the Constitutional Council ruling and aims to clarify its significance by compiling the human rights provisions to which the Council said judges should refer when interpreting laws. 20. OHCHR, together with the Ministry of Social Affairs, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF organized an awareness-raising workshop on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol in March 2008. It encouraged the Government to follow up on its signing of the Convention and Protocol in October 2007 with full ratification, as well as ratification of ILO Convention No. 159 (1983) concerning Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (Disabled Persons). A Cambodian delegation attended a two-day workshop organized by OHCHR and ILO in Bangkok in June 2008 on the Convention and the right to work. A national law on the rights of persons with disabilities, which has been drafted over more than 10 years, was adopted by the National Assembly in June 2009. OHCHR understands that the Government does not intend to ratify the Convention before 2013. 2. Institution-building 21. OHCHR continued to advise on the establishment of a national human rights institution (NHRI). Following his visit in December 2007, Brice Dixon, former Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, prepared a commentary on the draft law on an NHRI, which OHCHR shared with the working group of NGOs responsible for the draft. There was little progress on the draft during the reporting period, in part due to the national elections