After a two days meeting in Bangkok, at the end of October, the statistical experts of the UN agencies have come with a controversial list of 159 “generally agreed” indicators to measure the Sustainable Development Goals approved last September by the UN.

Traditionally, development agencies have tried to summarize in a single indicator or index complex development goals. Thus, UNICEF emphasized infant mortality as a proxy indicator of its mandate to protect children, the World Bank has traditionally equated development with per capita income, and UNDP enriched that idea with its Human Development Index based on a larger but still reduced set of indicators. Those single figures were considered to correlate so closely with other relevant indicators (for example infant mortality correlates with child underweight) that they were considered as useful to represent broad trends, progress or regression, in realities that everybody understood as being complex.

The arbitrary detention of Hossam Bahgat, (the founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, an  independent  Egyptian  human  rights  organization  and  a  journalist at Mada Masr, an online news site), on November 9th, 2015 is a mere reflection of the crackdown on civil rights in Egypt and the grim truth about the restricted enjoyment of the ‘’freedom’’ of expression and opinion in the country, that is essentially guaranteed by the Egyptian Constitution Article 651 and Article 19th of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, that Egypt is party to.

With this year’s Business and Human Rights Forum (November 16-18) scheduled to take place at almost the same time as the Group of 20 Summit (November 14-15), the temptation to highlight the dissonance between what is happening in each of these venues is just too great to resist.

At the Forum on Business and Human Rights, the main theme will revolve around a report on measuring implementation of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“Guiding Principles”), submitted last July by the Working Group on Business and Human Rights.

Fifteen years after the adoption of Security Council resolution 1325 on women and peace and security, Iraqi women and girls are being displaced, abducted, enslaved and made victims of sexual and physical violence as a result of the escalating violence. This has increased since June 2014, when one third of Iraq was occupied by gangs of ISIS (Daesh) perpetrating the most heinous crimes, as contained in the report of the United Nations Office of High Commissioner for human rights in March 2015.

In an atmosphere of unbridled violence, weak law enforcement institutions, absence of protection mechanisms and the entrenching of tribal and religious customs and traditions, women are more vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, and denial of basic rights such as education, along with the emergence of phenomena and harmful practices, such as child marriage, temporary marriage, trafficking in women, so-called honour crimes. Women become the price to pay debts and settle clan disputes rather than be an active element in resolving disputes and negotiations, as stressed in the resolution 1325.

The Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (“the Committee”), deciding on the first case filed before it using a novel individual complaint mechanism, took the opportunity to address the behavior of a private bank. The body mandated Spain to reform aspects of its legislation that allowed banking entities to get away with abuses in mortgage proceedings thus violating the right to housing consecrated by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

In 2008, States adopted an Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which, among other things, created a remedy allowing individuals to bring a complain before the respective Treaty –monitoring body (the Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights).