“Article 2 of Decree 2007-1137 indicates that all CNCDH opinions, statements and reports are made public. Further the NHRI regularly appears before Parliament to present and discuss its opinions and reports.

In practice, the CNCDH also issues an annual report on its activities and opinions on human rights, as well as a report on the fight against racism. In addition, the CNCDH issues a periodic report on the state of human rights in the country with the most recent report covering the period of 2017 to 2021.

However, the SCA notes that the enabling legislation does not explicitly require the preparation, publication and wide distribution of a report on the human rights situation on a yearly basis. The SCA further notes that the enabling legislation does not provide for the CNCDH annual and state of human rights reports to be debated by Parliament.

The SCA considers it important that the enabling law of an NHRI establish a process whereby the institution’s reports, including a general report on the human rights situation, are required to be widely circulated, discussed and considered by the legislature.

The SCA encourages the CNCDH to advocate for changes to its enabling legislation to explicitly include the requirement to submit an annual report to Parliament as well as to make explicit the procedure by which these reports will be discussed and considered.  

The SCA refers to Paris Principle A.3 and to its General Observation 1.11 on ‘Annual reports of NHRIs’.”