Short answers, pulled from the story.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on the 16th of December 1966 via Resolution 2200A (XXI). It entered into force on the 23rd of March 1976, after its thirty-fifth ratification or accession.
The ICCPR has 175 state parties. Six additional states have signed but not yet ratified the treaty, most notably China and Cuba. North Korea is the only state to have attempted to withdraw from the Covenant.
The ICCPR protects a broad range of rights across its fifty-three articles, including the right to life, freedom from torture and slavery, liberty and security of the person, the right to a fair trial, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and political participation including the right to vote. It also protects minority rights and mandates equal protection before the law.
The UN Human Rights Committee is the body established under Part 4 of the ICCPR to oversee compliance. States must report on their implementation one year after acceding to the Covenant, and then roughly every four years. The Committee meets at the UN Office in Geneva, Switzerland, normally holding three sessions per year, and also adjudicates individual complaints from parties to the First Optional Protocol.
There are two Optional Protocols. The First Optional Protocol, with 116 parties, allows individuals to bring complaints of rights violations to the Human Rights Committee. The Second Optional Protocol, with 92 parties, commits signatories to abolishing the death penalty, with a permitted reservation for the most serious military crimes committed during wartime.
The United States Senate ratified the ICCPR in 1992 with five reservations, five understandings, and four declarations. Key reservations included retaining the right to impose capital punishment on individuals under 18 and interpreting the ban on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment through the lens of the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Senate also declared that Articles 1 through 27 are not self-executing, meaning they cannot be directly invoked in American courts.