Join Dialogue on Shadow Reports about Treaties

Shadow reports have been used by Canadian NGOs, for example, in alerting the UN CEDAW Committee to different views than appeared in the formal national country report by the Canadian government on their progress in implementing the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. - FW

http://www.newtactics.org:80/en/blog/new-tactics/using-shadow-reports-advocacy

June 16th, 2009

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION IN ONLINE DIALOGUE ON USING SHADOW REPORTS FOR ADVOCACY

Join New Tactics and the featured resource practitioners for an online dialogue on 'Using Shadow Reports for Advocacy' from August 26 to September 1, 2009. This online dialogue will be a space for practitioners and scholars to share experiences, challenges, successes, resources and tool for the effective use of shadow reports to expose the reality of the human rights situation in their countries.

Shadow reports are submitted to treaty bodies at the United Nations to accompany a government's report regarding the human rights situation in its respective country. Shadow reports are written by NGOs in response to official government reports to treaty monitoring bodies.

Though practitioners working on shadow reports for any treaty monitoring body are invited to participate, this dialogue will limit its range of examples to the following human rights treaties:

Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of
National Minorities (FCNM)
UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW)
UN Convention against Torture (CAT)
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)

During this dialogue, practitioners will share their experiences, ideas, challenges and successes in carrying out the following steps in using shadow reports for advocacy:

Deciding how to use shadow report: Engaging the media? Correcting official report?

Strengthen collaboration of NGOs? Attract international pressure?

Creating the shadow report: collecting data, collaboration with other NGOs v. independent reports, facing dilemmas of legitimacy and credibility

Advocacy: How do you attract international attention and pressure? How do you engage the media?

Training: How have you trained other NGOs to implement this process? What resources exist for this kind of training?

Measuring impact: How do you know if the tactic was successful?

Join us here on August 26 - September 1!
SIGN UP ON WEBSITE LINK: http://www.newtactics.org:80/en/blog/new-tactics/using-shadow-reports-advocacy