In his exchange of views with the Committee of Ministers Delegates, Giuseppe Palmisano, President of the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR), emphasised the continued efforts of the ECSR to improve the effectiveness and efficacy of the monitoring system of the European Social Charter, along the lines with the proposals made by the Steering Committee for Human Rights (CDDH) in its June 2019 Report on improving the protection of social rights in Europe.

In this connection, Giuseppe Palmisano drew the Deputies’ attention to the position paper on follow-up to the report and proposals of the CDDH, where the Committee highlights the most important steps to be taken in the near future to strengthen and develop the protection of social rights in Europe by improving the Charter monitoring system.

Giuseppe Palmisano underlined that the ECSR is striving to make the reporting procedure evolve from a general and rather formal exercise into a targeted and strategic one, based on a selection of topical issues and questions relating to the thematic group under consideration. The targeted questions (Revised Charter and 1961 Charter) sent to States Parties earlier this year for their reports for Conclusions 2021 on health, social security and social protection is a concrete example of this approach.

The ECSR is also determined to improve the monitoring under the collective complaints procedure through a closer scrutiny of the admissibility of complaints and more frequent requests for observations under Article 32A of its Rules to organisations, institutions and experts, with a view to obtaining information and insights on the issues at stake.

In addition, Giuseppe Palmisano made concrete proposals to further strengthen the control system of the Charter, namely:

• organise a Conference of the parties aimed at giving impulse to the reform process;
• improve the “à la carte” system by increasing the minimum number of “core” provisions of the Charter to be accepted by States Parties;
• make the collective complaints procedure binding;
• increase the number of members of the ECSR and clarify their profile;
• add new rights or issues to the Revised Charter.

Intervention of Giuseppe Palmisano before the Committee of Ministers Delegates