A/HRC/38/18 B. Expertise and knowledge 10. The knowledge and expertise that civil society organizations contributed were distinguishing assets in policymaking, advisory services, meetings, panels and various intergovernmental negotiations. Civil society informed the debate and injects knowledge, including from communities, into decision-making structures and programmes at the regional and international levels. Moreover, civil society think tanks and knowledge hubs produced valuable educational resources based on research and aggregated data. Civil society organizations had indeed grown to establish a system of international pressure on the development of human rights. 4 For example, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a civil society organization of some 400 groups, had received the 2017 Nobel Prize for Peace for supporting the negotiation and adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Furthermore, the International Coalition for Sustainable Aviation had contributed to the work of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection on technical issues, including the development of standards. C. Implementation, monitoring and evaluation 11. Civil society had the added advantage of having close links with grass-roots organizations and individuals, and could therefore help to increase the effectiveness of United Nations interventions at the local level. The International Fund for Agricultural Development had worked with civil society on the design and implementation of projects, while FAO noted that civil society organizations often operated in complex humanitarian disasters where Governments did not have the immediate capacity to provide adequate services, for example, in food production. UNAIDS noted that civil society organizations monitored and reported on countries’ progress towards achieving global AIDS targets and also acted as providers of HIV prevention, treatment, care and support services. The strengthening of civil society partnerships on project planning and implementation had made strides in peacebuilding. For example, the Gender and Youth Promotion Initiative of the Peacebuilding Support Office, through its Peacebuilding Fund, supported civil society organizations as direct recipients of funding for peacebuilding, thus promoting the implementation of joint projects on sustaining peace, among others. 12. Certain multilateral organizations included civil society organizations in shaping programmatic aspects of their work. The World Summit on the Information Society Forum was a unique gathering where the programme and agenda were completely crowdsourced by stakeholders. At the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), civil society organizations could contribute fully, individually and collectively to objectives, priorities and the programming cycle, including specifically the draft medium-term strategy and the draft programme and budget. To craft the agenda of the Forum on Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law, OHCHR called for inputs from a wide range of stakeholders and used the suggestions received to identify the main topics for discussion. III. Procedures and practices related to civil society engagement in regional and international organizations 13. The United Nations was recognized as a unique and precious global meeting place.5 On the basis of the inputs received, the present report describes the procedures and practices of regional and international organizations in terms of civil society engagement, 4 5 See W. Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 18. See W. Foster and A. Anand (eds), Whose World is it Anyway? Civil Society, the United Nations and the multilateral future (United Nations Assn, 1999), p. 45. 5