EU Statement – UN General Assembly 3rd Committee: Informal meeting on Working Methods

Mr Chair,

On behalf of the EU and its Member States, let me start by thanking the Chair of the 3C for convening this meeting and the opportunity to have an informal and open exchange on the working methods of the Committee. We take this opportunity to reiterate our gratitude to the Chair and Bureau of the Third Committee for their tireless work during the 78th Session of the General Assembly for the betterment of human rights.

The EU is in broad agreement that the growing workload of the Third Committee's has become increasingly difficult to manage. Although present and past Bureaus and Secretariat, together with Member States, have all made a very good effort to become more we fully agree that we need to continue our deliberations to find ways to improve the working methods to ensure that the Committee can deliver on its important mandate. We don´t think there is a simple solution to our challenges by simply increasing the number of meeting days. These deliberations should of course build on previous discussions, and efforts already made in this regard, and draw on best practices and lessons learnt from the Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva, as well the other main committees of the General Assembly.

In order to feed into our deliberations and the next Conference Room paper, the EU would like to share the following preliminary and non-exhaustive list of possible ideas to consider:

Resolutions

• Continue and further encourage bi-annualization or tri-annualization of resolutions, which many EU Member States have done with their thematic resolutions, and even consider the possibility of phasing out longstanding resolutions
• Merge resolutions on similar or related topics
• Limit the number of informals for resolutions
• Limit requests for reporting and include a "sunset-clause" for resolutions that are only technical updates

Interactive Dialogues

• Continue and make more use of clustering IADs and have joint presentations by mandate holders on similar or related topics
• Encourage publication of all reports by mandate holders in a timely manner, to give delegations proper time to read the reports and prepare for the IADs before of the start of 3C - to contribute to enhance the quality of discussions and dialogue

Other

• Encourage continued close collaboration between the Chair/President and the bureaus of 3C and HRC (including the Coordination Committee of Special Procedures) to improve complementarity and synergies
• Use a scheduling system, similar to the Sched-app that is currently used by HRC in Geneva to better communicate and share information about upcoming meetings, informals, side-events to facilitate the work and planning of delegations

The keys are in the hands of all of us as Member States. Therefore we favour solutions that would really contribute to more efficient ways of working and ideally even reducing workload, as opposed to splitting, shifting or increasing 3C-sessions as this would just spread out the problems without addressing them. Which would also create overlaps with sessions of other fora throughout the year. This is why the EU could not support the proposal to create a resumed session and splitting the workload of the Committee in a fall and spring session that was put forward in previous Conference Room Paper.

We look forward to further discussions on these ideas - and other proposals and options - to improve our working methods and ensure that we can manage the growing workload of the Committee in an effective and responsible manner.

Thank you!

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