A/HRC/35/35 I. Introduction 1. The Human Rights Council appointed Virginia Dandan as Independent Expert on human rights and international solidarity with effect from 1 August 2011. In June 2014, in its resolution 26/6, the Council renewed the mandate until 2017. Ms. Dandan is the second mandate holder. 2. The Independent Expert expresses her thanks to the Member States of the Human Rights Council that have supported her mandate and cooperated with her. She also wishes to express her appreciation to those States that have not supported her mandate but who nevertheless engaged with her in dialogue to voice their positions with regard to the right to international solidarity. 3. The Independent Expert is grateful for the support and assistance she received from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva and in the regional offices, as well as for the advice and comments from experts of the treaty body system and from special procedure mandate holders. She acknowledges with gratitude the assistance of the legal experts who helped her shape and amend the draft declaration into its current form. She is also grateful to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for their consistent support, their efforts and contributions to raise awareness of and promote the right to international solidarity. She would like to give credit to and recognize all those who participated in the regional consultations on the draft declaration held in Addis Ababa, Doha, Geneva, Panama City and Suva. II. Activities undertaken by the mandate holder A. Summary of activities since the last reporting period1 1. Participation in an international expert workshop on international solidarity 4. The Independent Expert was invited by the Centre for Global Cooperation Research to participate in an international expert workshop entitled “International solidarity: yesterday’s ideal or emerging key norm?” held on 1 and 2 September 2016 in Berlin. She was requested to speak at the round-table session entitled “Solidarity as a prerequisite of international cooperation: the way forward.” Among the key issues for discussion at the session were inferring from pertinent documents that international solidarity is an emerging norm in international relations, and the potential of international solidarity in the light of the relationships between interests and norms in international relations, and with regard to diverse cultural and ethical backgrounds. As she was unable to travel to the conference owing to sudden illness, the Independent Expert’s paper was distributed among the panellists of the round table as material for discussion in her absence. Their comments on and discussion of her paper are contained in the published report of the workshop. 2 Her paper was also published in the monthly publication of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research.3 2. Report to the seventy-first session of the General Assembly 5. The Independent Expert submitted her thematic report to the General Assembly (A/71/280) for consideration at its seventy-first session. In her statement to the Assembly, she discussed the regional consultations on the proposed draft declaration on the right to international solidarity that had been held over the course of 2015 and 2016, as summarized in her previous report to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/32/43). 1 2 3 See the Independent Expert’s previous report to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/32/43). See www.sef-bonn.org/fileadmin/Die_SEF/Veranstaltungen/Exp-WS/2016_exp-ws_report_en.pdf. See Virginia Dandan, “The path to a right to international solidarity”, Foreign Voices, 2/2016. Available at http://www.sef_bonn.org/fileadmin/Die_SEF/Publikationen/Foreign_Voices/fv_201602_dandan.pdf. 3