Overview 109 session – Draft General Comment on Article 9
The Human Rights Committee made substantial progress with regard to the first reading of the Draft General Comment on Article 9 over the 109th session, reaching paragraph 58 of the 71 in the text. It is therefore likely that the Committee will conclude its first reading of the Draft General Comment at the next session. Thereafter the Rapporteur will produce a revised second draft, which will be circulated widely for comments before the Committee begins its second reading.
There was comparatively little substantive disagreement with the text produced by the Rapporteur, no doubt due in part to the Committee’s extensive jurisprudence on Article 9, which has formed the basis of much of the text. This meant that much of the discussion focused on how best to convey the Committee’s position, in particular the need to acknowledge the existence of exceptions, for instance to the time limits before a detainee can be brought before a judicial authority, without undermining the force of the rules.
There were, however, several more contentious issues, including the possibility of prosecutors carrying out judicial review functions in relation to detention and whether or not the right to a review of on-going detention under Article 9 §4 requires the detainee to physically appear before the Court.
Differences between the equally authoritative English, French and Spanish texts of Article 9 §5 of the ICCPR provoked a long debate. The English text refers to the enforceable right to compensation for unlawful arrest or detention, where the French and Spanish texts speak of the right to reparation (French: réparation, Spanish: reparación), which, it was rightly noted, is a much broader concept than ‘compensation’. Some Committee members expressed particular concern at the fact that the draft text of the General Comment had further narrowed the scope of this provision by referring to ‘financial compensation’.
All the discussions of the General Comment were webcast by the CCPR-Centre and can be found on the webcast archive.
The webcast of the Committee’s discussions during the two previous sessions can also be found on the Treaty Body Webcast Archive and a summary of the progress on the General Comment is provided in the Centre’s Overviews of the respective sessions.
