Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I N T E R N AT ION A L L AW
General Editors: Professor Philip Alston, Professor of International Law
at New York University, and Professor Vaughan Lowe, Chichele Professor
of Public International Law in the University of Oxford and Fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford.
A Commentary
M A N FR E D NOWA K
E L I Z A BE T H Mc A RT H U R
3. Issues of Interpretation
9 The proposal to establish national preventive mechanisms was intro-
duced for the first time by Mexico in February 2001.¹¹ Mexico belonged to
the group of States which strongly opposed the Costa Rica Draft because of
its alleged interference with State sovereignty and which, therefore, favoured
the idea of prior consent for every visit by the Subcommittee.¹² Its alterna-
tive draft was aimed at protecting the principle of State sovereignty and non-
interference with internal affairs by replacing the Subcommittee, as far as
possible, with a domestic body. In the Mexican Draft, the function of the
Subcommittee was reduced to being ‘responsible for supporting and super-
vising the work carried out by national mechanisms’.¹³ It is, therefore, not
surprising that many States and NGOs were originally very sceptical about
⁸ Ibid, §17.
⁹ Ibid, §§ 38, 40, 80.
¹⁰ CHR Res. 2002/33. See above, Art. 1 OP, 2.2.
¹¹ E/CN.4/2001/WG.11/CRP.1. See above, 2.
¹² Cf. above, Art. 1 OP, 2.2.
¹³ Art. 2 of the Mexican Draft, E/CN.4/2001/WG.11/CRP.1.