A/HRC/13/69 4. The treaty bodies continued their work to finalize treaty-specific reporting guidelines to complement the guidelines for the common core document. In 2009, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted its treaty-specific reporting guidelines and the Human Rights Committee started its work in this regard. Treaty bodies continued to develop, improve and implement such new working methods as establishing the list of issues prior to reporting and refining the follow-up procedures to concluding observations and views on petitions. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted new general comments. Treaty bodies and the Secretariat continued efforts to harmonize and standardize their work, including through the three-day ninth and tenth Inter-Committee Meetings of the Human Rights Treaty Bodies and the twoday twenty-first meeting of the chairpersons. 5. Treaty bodies and the Secretariat examined some 9,000 items of correspondence and over 110 new individual complaints received by the treaty bodies were registered. The Human Rights Committee, the Committee against Torture, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women examined and adopted final decisions on some 100 communications. They issued over 30 requests for interim measures of protection in cases where lack of such protection might lead to irreparable harm for the petitioners. They also followed up on over 50 decisions in which violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture or the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women had been found. In 2009, the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment undertook three country visits to Cambodia, Honduras and Paraguay. 6. Four meetings of States parties took place in Geneva or New York during 2009, essentially to hold elections to fill seats for which mandates had terminated (the Human Rights Committee, the Committee against Torture, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families). In the case of the Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the membership expanded to 14 members following the entry into force of the Convention for the forty-first State party in July 2009 and its meeting of States parties thus also elected experts to fill the new seats. During 2009, human rights treaty bodies also had six informal meetings with States parties which were widely attended and provided an opportunity for States parties and treaty bodies to discuss the most recent developments in the work of treaty bodies, as well as other matters of common interest, in particular the efforts of treaty bodies to improve their working methods (the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Human Rights Committee, the Committee against Torture, the Subcommittee on Prevention, the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families). An open-ended working group of the Human Rights Council on an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child to provide a communications procedure met from 14 to 18 December 2009.1 7. OHCHR updated the training tool (DVD) on the work of the treaty bodies, entitled “Bringing human rights home”, which will also be made available in all United Nations official languages. The Office also conducted training workshops on treaty body reporting and follow-up in Burundi, Djibouti, the Maldives, Niger, Serbia and the Seychelles, as well 1 2 The report of the working group was submitted to the thirteenth session of the Human Rights Council, to be held in March 2010 (A/HRC/13/43).