A/HRC/37/79 I. Introduction A. Background 1. The United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights, established by the Commission on Human Rights in its resolution 1987/38, receives voluntary contributions from Governments, organizations and individuals. The objective of the Fund is to provide financial support for technical cooperation aimed at building and strengthening national and regional institutions, legal frameworks and infrastructures that will have a positive long-term impact on the implementation of international human rights standards. 2. The Board of Trustees has been operational since 1993 and its members are appointed by the Secretary-General for a three-year renewable term. The mandate of the Board is to assist the Secretary-General in streamlining and rationalizing the working methods and procedures of the technical cooperation programme. It meets twice a year and reports on its work to the Secretary-General and the Human Rights Council. Its current members are Mariclaire Acosta Urquidi (Mexico), Morten Kjaerum (Denmark), Lin Lim (Malaysia), Esi Sutherland-Addy (Ghana) and Valeriya Lutkovska (Ukraine). Mr. Kjaerum and Ms. Lutkovska were nominated by the Secretary-General to replace the seats vacated in 2017 by Ilze Brands Kehris (Latvia) and Christopher Sidoti (Australia), respectively. At its forty-fourth session, the Board elected Mariclaire Acosta Urquidi as Chair from 30 June 2017 to 30 June 2018. B. Mandate 3. The refocused approach, agreed upon by the Board of Trustees and presented in 2011 to Member States in the annual report of the Secretary-General to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/16/66) continues to be appreciated by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and its partners. During the period under review, the Board continued to provide advice on policy and strategic orientation of the technical cooperation components of OHCHR. The capacity of the Board to provide strategic advice in the area of technical cooperation has substantially increased and strengthened through its visits to field presences and discussions with all partners on the ground. Over the last five years the Board has visited at least one field presence in every region of the world. 4. As members also of the Board of Trustees of the Voluntary Fund for Financial and Technical Assistance in the Implementation of the Universal Periodic Review, the Board continued to provide OHCHR with policy guidance in order to maximize the effectiveness of technical assistance and financial support for States in implementing recommendations of the universal periodic review and other international mechanisms at the State level. The Board discussed such strategic guidance at its seventh regular session in Geneva in March 2017 and at its 8th field meeting in Beirut in October 2017. Those discussions focused on strengthening the support of the Fund for national mechanisms for reporting and follow up; comprehensive national human rights action plans and recommendations for implementing such plans (linked to the Universal Human Rights Index, which provides easy access to country-specific human rights information emanating from international human rights mechanisms in the United Nations system, including the treaty bodies, the special procedures and the universal periodic review); integration of the outcomes of the universal periodic review into United Nations planning documents at the national level (United Nations Development Assistance Frameworks and other country-level plans); and key thematic human rights issues identified in recommendations. In that regard, the Board has also encouraged OHCHR to develop simplified and streamlined internal guidelines on how to use the Fund, which can serve as a key tool for OHCHR field presences to provide more effective follow-up support to States. 3