A number of human rights instruments which provide for the setting up of monitoring mechanisms and, consequently, the establishment of treaty bodies, have been adopted at the international level. Given the political difficulties of the years that followed the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the founding member states of the United Nations were unable to adopt a treaty to supplement the Declaration. Almost twenty years passed before the international community was able to agree on the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and a further decade before these instruments entered into force. It is no surprise that those responsible for drafting subsequent human rights instruments found it more convenient to adopt new texts rather than face the challenge of convincing states parties to the Covenants to adhere to additional protocols. This sheds some light on the reasons for the coexistence of numerous human rights instruments and, more particularly, seven human rights conventions dealing with universal rights and freedoms that overlap to a certain extent.

The following discussion analyses the effect of the existence of overlapping guarantees in various human rights instruments on their interpretation and on the operation of their respective examination regimes. The discussion will be limited to those six instruments that led to the establishment of monitoring bodies, namely ICESCR, ICCPR, the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Convention against Torture (CAT), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).