Thank you for your participation in our dialogue on Front Line Watchdogs: Monitoring accountability for human rights that took place from May 18 to 24, 2011.  You can read a summary of the topics discussed below and you can access the entire dialogue by clicking on the discussion threads at the bottom of this page.

Front line watchdogs come in all shapes and sizes. They can be seen in courtrooms ensuring fair trials, accompanying threatened human rights defenders, holding vigil outside police stations to prevent torture, protecting election ballot results, testing for discrimination, monitoring development aid projects, investigating toxic waste from companies, etc., etc.  While government bodies and corporations are often expected to monitor and regulate themselves, self-regulation does not always successfully uphold rights. Front line watchdogs take on this important citizen role of holding communities, government and corporations accountable.  Watchdog monitoring provides an opportunity to analyze, understand and influence abusive systems of power and to engage community members in human rights work.

Is it possible to develop an easy -to- use monitoring tool to measure progressive realisation of access to socio-economic rights by governments?

Shadow reports (often called 'alternative reports') are submitted to treaty monitoring bodies at the United Nations and other international institutions as an alternative to a government's official report regarding the human rights situation in its respective country. 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.

The Independent Monitoring Board in England and Wales (IMB) is not a pressure group but a constant presence in a prison, independent of the Governor, staff and prisoners, monitoring that the prison is being run according to the rules.  The IMB consists of a group of lay people living locally to a prison who are appointed by the Minister for Prisons to go into the prison, unannounced, at an