A/HRC/35/18 mechanism for reporting and follow-up, and supported the Governments of Barbados, Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the process of strengthening their national mechanisms for reporting and follow-up to recommendations from human rights mechanisms. The officer also provided assistance to the Governments of Barbados, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to establish a plan of action to implement recommendations emanating from the universal periodic review. 31. In the Plurinational State of Bolivia, improvements were made to SIPLUS, the system for following up, monitoring and gathering statistics on human rights recommendations made to the country by mechanisms within the universal system of human rights protection, following the system’s initial launch in December 2015. With the support of OHCHR, the web design and operational system were improved in order to ensure that everyone has easy access to all the human rights recommendations made to the country, as well as the State’s follow-up actions. Furthermore, the database connects the actions to human rights indicators that were developed by the Ministry of Justice and the National Institute of Statistics. The new version of the system was officially launched on 6 December 2016. 32. In Brazil, the national programme for the protection of human rights defenders has been severely weakened under the new administration, and its future remains uncertain. OHCHR piloted an activity in Brazil that planted the seed for a joint Inter-American Commission on Human Rights/OHCHR regional initiative on human rights defenders. OHCHR prepared an analysis of the legal, institutional and public policy framework, which identified the groups at risk and the root causes of violations of the rights of human rights defenders in the country and the specific challenges they face. It included groups that are invisible in terms of statistics and reporting, such as women and urban human rights defenders. The analysis included a set of recommendations and called for the United Nations system in Brazil to take a more active role on that issue, particularly in the case of reprisals. 33. Chile signed a cooperation agreement with SIMORE, the system set up in Paraguay to monitor the human rights recommendations it received, and was developing a mechanism to follow up on the recommendations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. OHCHR recently received a request to support follow-up to the recommendations of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. OHCHR hopes that, with the mandate of the Deputy Ministry of Human Rights fully established, Chile will move to a more integrated approach to include recommendations from all mechanisms. OHCHR has been discussing with the new Deputy Minister priorities for the mandate, which includes the preparation of a national human rights action plan. 34. In Costa Rica, OHCHR and the United Nations country team continued supporting the national reporting and follow-up mechanism, in particular in the adoption of the 2016 workplan and the establishment of priority initiatives in the area of non-discrimination. OHCHR support enabled the compilation of existing human rights programmes/public policies and the establishment of a permanent mechanism for civil society participation therein. OHCHR also initiated preparations for the piloting of the multilingual universal database to follow up on the implementation of the recommendations of the human rights mechanisms. 35. In the Dominican Republic, progress was made in strengthening the Ombudsman’s Office, the national human rights institution, and in developing a national human rights action plan. Progress was also made in terms of setting up a permanent, participatory and strengthened human rights mechanism within the Executive to effectively engage with international human rights mechanisms, including by fulfilling reporting obligations and follow-up to and implementation of recommendations. The official launch of the action plan, originally scheduled for December 2016, was postponed to the first quarter of 2017. The approval of the action plan will require the revision and reinforcement of the interinstitutional Commission on Human Rights, which is called to play an active role in following up the implementation of the plan. As a result of the consultancy carried out in 2015 to support the process of developing the action plan and the mechanism for dialogue with civil society organizations, the main human rights recommendations from the United Nations treaty bodies and the universal periodic review were systematized and shared with 7