This Article calls attention to a fundamental challenge that has been downplayed in current efforts to strengthen the United Nations (UN) human rights treaty body system, namely, the system’s insulation and alienation from local stakeholders who are supposed to take part in the processes of monitoring State implementation of treaty obligations. The current approach by the human rights treaty bodies to seek to conduct more local outreach initiatives, however, is inadequate as a solution. Instead, a new framework is required to redefine treaty monitoring as a joint project co-owned by the local as well as the global actors. This new framework calls for placing local stakeholders at the center of the monitoring exercise to review the human rights performance of their State, rather than as merely an outreach target. It also calls for empowering local stakeholders with global resources and interventions. To illustrate how human rights treaty monitoring can benefit from this new framework, I present the empirical study of the self-created, on-site human rights treaty review of the Republic of China on Taiwan, a non-UN member state that cannot take part in the UN human rights treaty system. In the Taiwan experience, the local actors are in full command of making crucial decisions concerning the design and administration of the review processes while global resources are constantly drawn upon to enhance its efficacy, credibility and legitimacy. This case study helps us think in concrete terms about how human rights treaty monitoring can be enriched by a framework that honors the notion of local-global co-ownership. This Article contributes to the scholarship by offering a new understanding of how the local and global components can complement each other in monitoring human rights treaty implementation, and more broadly, other international human rights projects that require extensive local engagement. It also demonstrates the need for ongoing research on the application of international human rights norms and institutions in Taiwan which, excluded from the UN system, provides a fertile ground for experimentation.
