A/HRC/20/25 measures in the context of economic, social and cultural rights and a lack of public awareness regarding those rights and their justiciability. 25. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the efforts to reform the judicial system, and reiterates her recommendation that Ecuador ensure that economic, social and cultural rights are directly applicable and justiciable in practice. To do so, it must strengthen training for judges and lawyers on the implementation of those rights and take measures to facilitate access to the justice system by impoverished members of society. 26. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the establishment of the National Coordinator on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights within the Defensoría del Pueblo, and calls on this NHRI to actively follow up on the implementation of the recommendations of human rights mechanisms in general and to address the specific issue of extreme poverty in its thematic reports. The Defensoría del Pueblo should also consider addressing paradigmatic cases to advance the legal recognition of economic, social and cultural rights within the domestic justice system. 27. Since the mission, the Government has implemented the 2007-2010 National Development Plan and adopted the 2009-2013 National Plan for Good Living (Plan Nacional para el Buen Vivir). However, information received suggests a pressing need to strengthen the monitoring and evaluation system of the National Development Plan, which lacks detailed and easily accessible information on progress made towards its goals. The Special Rapporteur recalls her recommendation to integrate human rights standards into the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of such programmes, and thus welcomes the collaboration between Ecuador and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in integrating human rights principles and approaches into development planning.17 B. Social protection 28. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the evolution of the social protection system in Ecuador. While she acknowledges the use of human rights discourse in the formulation of social policies, further efforts need to be made to convert this rhetoric into practice and ensure that social protection is grounded in a rights-based approach. Social security (including contributory and non-contributory systems) should not be understood as discretionary assistance; rather, it is a right that must be ensured to everyone within the country, as recognized in the Constitution. 29. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the efforts undertaken by Ecuador to increase the coverage of the BDH programme. As of 2010, Ecuador was the country in Latin America with the largest percentage of the population (44 per cent) covered by a cash transfer programme.18 Despite these successes, information received gives rise to ongoing concerns about the adequacy of the incorporation of human rights principles in the Ecuadorian social protection system. While the Special Rapporteur welcomes the fact that penalties for noncompliance with conditionalities are still not applied in practice, she calls on the State to eliminate conditionalities from the programme. The imposition of conditionalities raises a number of concerns from a human rights perspective, documented in the Special Rapporteur’s previous thematic reports and raised with the Government in the country mission report. 17 18 See www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/PuttingHRintopracticethroughdevelopmenttheEcuadori anexperience.aspx. Simone Cecchini and Aldo Madariaga, Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes: The Recent Experience in Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, 2011), p. 103. 7