[ Earlier at Kabonfootprint blog, you read about United nation's human right, The human rights inter American commission, and Kabonfootprint and Human Rights. This post is an continuation of our 5 part article series on Human Rights.]

International law is bound to take precedence over any domestic law of a state. Hence, wherever a country signs a treaty, it is actually pledging to adopt all the provisions promoted by the treaty into the state’s domestic law. This way mechanism based on treaty tends to vary from those based on charter.

Sometimes, the mechanisms of the UN charter are not bound legally or these require permit in order to be executed. Treaties are supported by the norms that regulate international law and hence are legally binding.

Legal instruments running globally tend to take shape of a treaty. The treaty is also known as an agreement, protocol or convention. These bind on contracting states. As soon as the completion of negotiations takes place, the treaty text is duly established as authentic and definitive.

It is also signed by the State’s representatives. A state can express its consent to the treaty through various modes. The most common means in this regard is Ratification or Accession. A brand new treaty can be easily ratified by a state that has negotiated the instrument. Any state that has not taken, participation in the negotiations an accede to the treaty later. The treaty is applied as soon as a pre-determined number of states ratify or accede to it.

As soon as a state accedes or ratifies to a specific treaty, it may develop some reservations to one or more articles included in the treaty unless the reservations are strictly prohibited by the treaty. Reservations can be withdrawn at any period of time. In certain countries, treaties that are international tends to over power national laws.

In others, a different law may be needed to provide international treaty the required force of a national law. As a law, all states that have acceded or ratified to an international treaty needs to issue decrees and amend existing laws or bring out brand new legislation so as to make the treaty fully effective all over the territory of a country.

The UN has seven human rights treaties at present as mentioned below:

1. The international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (ICESCR)
2. The International covenant on civil and political rights (ICCPR)
3. The international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (ICERD)
4. The convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (CEDAW)
5. The convention against torture and other inhuman, cruel or degrading treatment or punishment (CAT)
6. The convention on the rights of the child (CRC)
7. The international convention on the protection of the rights of all migrant workers and members of their families

Every treaty mentioned above consists of a monitoring body and is composed of independent experts who analyze the reports submitted by the signatory nations under the treaty.

The committees are also required to issue comments or concluding observations where they summarize their worries related to some states and also provide recommendations for the future.

Four treaty committees have mechanisms to deal directly with different complaints of violations of human rights under their own treaties. These include:

1. Human rights committee for ICCPR
2. The committee on the elimination of racial discrimination for ICERD
3. Committee against torture for CAT
4. Committee on the elimination of all types of discrimination against women.

Kabonfootprint is thankful to readers who helped us to make 2nd comeback. The kabonfootprint team is still busy doing client side projects, but we are really very much passionate to continue blogging at Kabonfootprint-kabon.com.

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