"Meeting the Challenge of Human Rights"
"Meeting the Challenge of Human Rights"
by UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights
Sounding the Century
Lecture
By
Mary Robinson,
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
"Meeting the Challenge
of Human Rights"
London, 23 September 1999
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The theme of this evening's lecture
"Meeting the Challenge of Human Rights" could not be more
timely. Human rights belong centre stage in today's
political and ethical debate. Events in East Timor have
angered and outraged people around the world and have once
again raised fundamental questions about whether and how
human rights can be secured and defended in our modern
world.
All of us are called upon to play a part in
championing and defending human rights. In my comments
tonight I will concentrate on countries far away because
their problems are so urgent and on such a scale, but it
should not obscure the challenges closer to home. One such
challenge is racism. We are preparing for a World Conference
on Racism which will be held in less than two years time. I
need hardly remind you that racism has deep roots and that
it has many ways of making its distinctive, ugly presence
felt. New forms of racism have appeared, for example in the
shape of hate-filled messages on the Internet. And it is not
confined to prejudice on the grounds of colour: all sorts of
minorities can be the target of racism and discrimination,
from migrant workers to asylum seekers to indigenous people.
So let us not forget: human rights are for all, whether you live in Luanda or London.
I believe that
human rights can be secured and defended - I do not think
that this is an impossibly idealistic goal. I say this in
the face of what happened in East Timor, the atrocities that
were reported to me by the refugees, political leaders and
human rights defenders I met when I visited the region. I
say it in the face of the horrors I witnessed in Sierra
Leone and Kosovo a few months earlier and in many other
parts of the world I have visited in the two years since I
was appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights.
During this time I have been reflecting on
how to shape the human rights debate as we take stock of one
century and enter another. As Secretary General Kofi Annan
reminds us, we face a two-fold challenge: to make the next
century the century of human rights and to create a world
wide culture of conflict prevention. To address the first
part of the challenge we don't need to write new laws, we
need to implement in practice, on the ground, the
international norms and standards that exist. To achieve the
second part we need the approach urged recently by the
Foreign Minister of Sweden, Anna Lindh, when she wrote:
"In all cultures and every society, prevention is
something normal. Measures are taken to avert crop
destruction by floods or rodents. Cattle are protected from
predators. Warning signals are placed at rail crossings and
air traffic is controlled to avoid accidents. Insurance
policies are developed in almost all areas of human
activity. All this is the result of preventive thinking,
based on the assumption that accidents and disasters can be
avoided if you think ahead while preparing for the
worst...It is high time to transfer and strengthen the
sophisticated preventive habits we know so well at home into
the field of international security."
East Timor,
Kosovo, Sierra Leone: all have experienced terrible human
rights abuses that test our belief in the achievability of a
worldwide culture of human rights and our capacity to
respond effectively to gross violations. Many more examples
could be given but I will focus on these three countries as
I can bear personal witness to the enormous suffering of
victims where we fail to prevent conflicts and gross
violations of human rights.
Legislation and
Norms
Major advances have been made in the legislative
and normative field since the adoption of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
- Legitimacy has
been secured for the principle that human rights are
universal and indivisible. Governments accused of human
rights abuses may still try to hide behind the veil of
national sovereignty but it is a position that is
increasingly hard to sustain. Even those Governments which
are the worst offenders realise that internationally agreed
human rights norms are not going to go away.
- Flowing
from the Universal Declaration has come an impressive body
of human rights treaties, conventions, covenants and
declarations including the two major covenants on civil and
political rights and on economic, social and cultural rights
respectively. There are four core conventions on the rights
of children, on women, on racial discrimination and on
torture, and more than 60 further human rights instruments.
A large majority of States have ratified the major
conventions and Secretary General Kofi Annan and I have
urged universal ratification by 2003.
These
legislative achievements are impressive. The challenge, of
course, is to implement this impressive array of
legislation. We are at the stage where we must move from the
era of standard setting to putting the principles of the
international treaties into practice. As Dag Hammarsjold put
it
"The constant struggle to close the gap between
aspiration and performance now, as always, makes the
difference between civilisation and chaos."
It is
salutary to think that he made that point 40 years ago and
that today we find ourselves still confronted by a huge gap
between aspiration and reality in the field of human rights.
Because the reality is that, in spite of Governments'
undertakings and their legal obligations, every day there
are fresh, terrible examples of human rights abuses in many
parts of the world. These abuses are brought home vividly to
us by the print media, radio and television. We owe a lot to
the courageous activities of journalists, human rights
defenders and non-governmental organisations who bear
witness to abuses wherever they occur.
The public
response, understandably, is to ask why more cannot be done
about gross human rights violations. Why have people in the
Balkans or East Timor or Central Africa to endure so much to
secure rights about which there is a universal consensus?
Why have there been genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia when
the whole of the modern human rights movement is predicated
on the determination, born out of the horrors of the
Holocaust, that genocide would never happen again? Why
cannot the international community - and the United Nations
in particular - prevent these horrors from happening?
East Timor
The awful abuses committed in East
Timor shocked the world - and rightly so since it would be
hard to conceive of a more blatant assault on the rights of
hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. The murders,
maimings, rapes and countless other atrocities committed by
the militias with the involvement of elements of the
security forces were especially repugnant because they came
in the aftermath of the freely expressed wishes of the East
Timorese people about their political future. I heard
numerous first-hand allegations of a well-planned and
systematic policy of killings, displacement, destruction of
property and intimidation.
All of the warning signs
were there but the horrors still happened. East Timor was a
test of the world's preparedness to translate fine-sounding
promises about human rights into action, and it was a test
we all but failed. For a time it seemed that the world would
turn away altogether from the people of East Timor, turn
away from the plain evidence of the brutality, killings and
rapes. Action, when it came, was painfully slow; thousands
paid for the slow response of the international community
with their lives.
However, a multilateral force is
now in East Timor, with the cooperation of the Government of
Indonesia, and I have just come from the opening of a
special session of the UN Commission on Human Rights in
Geneva on the issue of human rights violations in East
Timor. This is only the fourth time in over fifty years that
the Commission on Human Rights has met in Special Session,
and I shall return to Geneva for the continuation of the
Session tomorrow.
It was the tide of public anger
which stirred world leaders to intervene, however belatedly,
on behalf of the East Timorese people. I was struck by the
words of the poet Seamus Heaney who addressed a protest
meeting for East Timor. He said
"Everybody has felt the pity and the terror of the tragedy. But I think that we have also experienced something more revealing, which is a feeling of being called upon, a feeling of being in some way answerable".
That feeling "of being answerable" seems
to me to go to the heart of the challenge we face in
translating the principles of human rights into reality.
Some people regard it as naive to believe in universal human
rights; I believe, on the contrary, that the growth in the
human rights movement is one of the most hopeful, optimistic
developments of our time. To the often-repeated quote about
human rights being "the major article of faith of a culture
which fears it believes in nothing else" I would reply that
if people believed in nothing else except universal human
rights and put them into practice, the world would be a much
better place.
Kosovo
Michael Ignatieff has
written, in the context of the Balkans tragedy, that "we
need to be as ruthless and determined in our choice of means
as we have been high-minded in our choice of ends." That
argument has been heard a lot in regard to Kosovo. Kosovo is
held out as an example of the idealism of human rights
defenders colliding with the cold brutality of a regime
which thought nothing of manipulating ethnic fears and
expelling hundreds of thousands from their homes and
country.
There are many lessons to be learned from
Kosovo but to my mind the most important is that Kosovo
represented a failure by the international community to act
in time to prevent a tragedy which everyone predicted. For
ten years observers on the ground had been warning about the
need for action to address a deteriorating human rights
situation in Kosovo. Nobody could have failed to see the red
light flashing. What was lacking was the foresight and the
political will to do something before the situation reached
crisis point. The result was an attempt at conflict
management instead of conflict prevention with an appalling
cost in human lives and material damage.
The cost of
failing to take preventive action over Kosovo was truly
staggering. More than 10,000 innocent civilians are
estimated to have been killed in massacres in Kosovo. A
further 1,200 civilians were killed by the NATO bombing in
Yugoslavia as well as perhaps 5,000 members of the security
forces there. Hundreds of thousands were driven from their
homes. The estimated cost of the NATO air campaign was over
£5 billion while the estimated cost of the reconstruction of
the Balkans region as a whole will top the £20 billion mark.
And that does not take account of the huge humanitarian aid
effort and peacekeeping costs.
But, it will be asked, what action can or should be taken once gross human rights violations on the scale of those perpetrated in Kosovo are happening before our eyes and those responsible will not stop? It is obvious that there are situations where peace enforcing will be necessary - East Timor is another example. But we should always be aware that such operations are a last, bad resort, an admission of earlier failures. I strongly believe that they should only take place when authorised by the Security Council and then in a manner which is proportionate and which protects the civilian population on all sides.
Sierra Leone
In May
and June of this year, while the world was focussed on
Kosovo, I visited that region twice. In between, I visited
Sierra Leone. I did so in response to an invitation to see
the situation in a country which will soon have the largest
number of human rights monitors deployed by my Office. This
is to happen in the context of the Lome Peace Agreement
which it is hoped will put an end to the terrible bloodshed
of the past twenty years. I was conscious, too, that with
the media of the world monitoring Kosovo, few had thoughts
for the tragedy of Sierra Leone. Human rights abuses go on
whether the cameras are rolling or not.
The facts of
the fighting in Sierra Leone are well known but nothing can
prepare you for seeing at firsthand the extent and cruelty
of the violence committed against innocents in that country.
There has been a campaign of terror in Sierra Leone,
deliberately aimed at the civilian population. The number of
deaths will never be known, nor are there accurate figures
for those who have been deliberately maimed. Certain figures
do exist: around 4,000 people have been hospitalised with
amputation wounds, 50% of them women. It is estimated that
for every person hospitalised, four others suffered severe
injuries but did not get hospital treatment. In January of
this year, between 5,000 and 7,000 people were killed in
Freetown alone. Property destruction in the capital has
amounted to 90%.
A tragic feature of the conflict in
Sierra Leone was the deliberate targeting of children for
murdering and maiming. This phenomenon is especially
chilling in that it has taken place in the year when we mark
the tenth anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the
Child and the perpetrators are themselves often children.
Yet when it comes to addressing Sierra Leone's
problems, what has been the record? For the most part, the
world has not wanted to know. For example, compared to the
billions which will go into the reconstruction of Kosovo,
the target for donors to Sierra Leone this year is 25
million dollars. Even that modest target has not been met:
so far, less than 9 million dollars has been donated or
pledged.
It is small wonder if people in Sierra Leone
feel that there is a lesser value put on their lives than on
others. And Sierra Leone is better placed than some African
countries in that the peace negotiations have focussed
attention there this year so it may expect some increase in
international interest and funding. Others are not so lucky
- think of Somalia, not long ago the object of intense
international attention and today a collapsed state with no
central government and little or no international concern.
Sierra Leone - and so many other countries - force us to reexamine whether the principle that human rights are universal and indivisible is really being put into practice or whether it is a case of greater value being placed on one person's human rights than another's. These are questions which the international community must address. In the case of Sierra Leone, I have urged that there should be a much greater focus on the peace effort and immediate international help to overcome the legacy of the conflict and to establish a culture of human rights. The same applies to all the other "forgotten" conflicts throughout the world.
Role of the United Nations in Human Rights
Many actors have a part to play in embedding a
culture of respect for human rights in the world -
Governments, international organisations, NGOs, businesses,
individuals - but the United Nations has a special role in
defending human rights and making them work properly. The
easiest thing to do when our aspirations are not matched by
reality is to blame the UN. But that is a simplistic
response. The United Nations is the representation of the
will of what we call the international community - which is
another way of saying all the people of the world - but
through the structure of Member States. It has many
failings, it can be cumbersome and slow-moving. But the UN,
uniquely, possesses the quality of universal legitimacy and
is a forum where every nation, from the tiniest to the most
powerful, can make its voice heard.
The United
Nations can only function effectively if the Member States,
and especially the larger ones including Britain, give it
sustained support and provide the resources needed to do the
job. There are many areas, my Office included, where the
resources are not adequate to the task. To give an example,
the core funding of the United Nations this year is $1.26
billion from around the world. Contrast that with the $15
billion which will be spent in Britain alone on celebrations
for the Millennium.
The UN depends on engaged
interest and adequate financial support on the part of
Member States in addressing the tough human rights problems
throughout the world. There are many urgent conflict and
country situations where the world's attention is at best
sporadic, at worst uncaring. The responsibility here lies on
all of us as individuals not to be governed by the disaster
headline syndrome. It is not enough to take an interest in
grave human rights violations for awhile, only to drop them
when they are no longer in the news. Individuals have a duty
to keep up the pressure on governments - and on big business
and all the other actors with a role in human rights - and
to try to ensure the media spotlight is not turned off.
Championing and defending human rights is a tough, long-term
task.
An Age of Prevention
As well as calling
for the next century to be the century of human rights, Kofi
Annan has emphasised that we must now enter the age of
prevention of conflicts. I see prevention as the main focus
of my Office's work. And prevention must be paramount for
every international actor, whether it be Foreign Ministries,
bilateral donors, transnational corporations and certainly
for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and all
of the agencies of the United Nations system.
Failures of prevention shame us all. Cambodia shamed
us, Kosovo shamed us and now East Timor has shamed us. Are
we going to be shamed again? Our failures to prevent the
gross violations of the past do not relieve us of the
responsibility to prevent their recurrence.
Protecting and Promoting Human Rights
On the positive side, the
UN's mechanisms to protect and promote human rights are
expanding and improving. We have the potential for an
effective early warning system.
- The Secretary
General's reform programme envisages the mainstreaming of
human rights in the UN system and concrete steps are being
taken to bring this about;
- Special Rapporteurs and
Special Representatives are appointed by the Commission on
Human Rights. They investigate and report back on country
situations or on thematic issues such as torture, religious
intolerance or violence against women and are effective
engines of change. The number of these mechanisms has grown
rapidly in recent years in response to the demand for action
to deal with gross abuses. These are courageous individuals
whose dedication and fearlessness sheds light in dark
places.
- There is commitment to strengthening the
United Nations human rights treaty mechanisms - the system
by which Governments are examined on the extent of their
adherence to the core human rights treaties. These
mechanisms have a low profile but they can achieve important
results.
- Two highly effective preventive tools are
field presences and technical cooperation. Our first human
rights field presence was established seven years ago; today
we have 22 in countries as diverse as Burundi , Colombia and
the former Yugoslavia. The biggest operation is in Cambodia
where the human rights field presence is making a
significant contribution to that country's reconstruction;
- The number of technical cooperation programmes is
also expanding rapidly - ten years ago we had 2, today we
have 55. An example is the agreement we signed in June with
the Russian government to put in place a major programme of
human rights education and so strengthen the human rights
culture in that country.
- Overall, the response to
the preventive approach is very favourable. Another example
is national human rights institutions. My Office is active
in offering technical advice and assistance to help get such
institutions established. We do so because we are aware that
independent national institutions can be extremely effective
catalysts in strengthening human rights within countries. So
far, OHCHR has responded to requests from over 40 countries
wishing to establish national institutions to promote and
protect human rights.
- Lastly, there is a
significant increase in the level of regional cooperation.
In the Asia-Pacific region, for example, there have been
valuable workshops on human rights themes and a framework
for regional technical cooperation has been drawn up. As a
personal initiative I have begun appointing regional
advisers on human rights - individuals who will galvanise
the potential for regional cooperation.
If preventive
measures succeed, we may not hear about it precisely because
a possible conflict has been avoided. No headlines, no
harrowing and sometimes voyeuristic images on television,
but human life and dignity protected and maintained. Quiet
diplomacy and skilful capacity building in human rights are
also important tools of prevention.
Accountability
One of my strongest convictions
is that there must be accountability for gross human rights
violations. I welcome the trend whereby courts are
increasingly allowing the prosecution of human rights cases,
irrespective of where they occurred or how much time has
elapsed. The decision of the House of Lords in the Pinochet
case was a landmark ruling on the potential of national
courts to enforce international commitments. I welcome, too,
the fact that the international judicial machinery is
finally moving into action: the setting up of ad hoc
tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda was an
important step forward and the adoption of the Statute of an
International Criminal Court providing jurisdiction over the
three core crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and
war crimes, was a milestone in the struggle to strengthen
respect for human rights and humanitarian law. What better
way could there be to usher in an age of prevention than for
States to ratify the Statute of the International Criminal
Court and allow it to begin its vital work?
The issue
of accountability loomed large during my visit to Sierra
Leone. The Lome Peace Agreement contains provision for a
broad national amnesty for all those who committed crimes in
the conflict in Sierra Leone - this would allow even those
guilty of the most brutal atrocities to go free. The United
Nations disagreed with the amnesty and entered a
reservation, pointing out that there could be no amnesty for
the grossest violations amounting to crimes against
humanity. Here, too, human rights defenders are accused of
being naive. Is an amnesty not a fair price to pay, it is
argued, if it means peace for a most distressed country?
The principle involved appears to me to be clear:
there must be no impunity from the grossest violations,
there must be accountability to break the cycle of impunity.
Of course, in the context of conflict resolution, tough,
often unpalatable decisions have to be made in the interest
of lasting peace and reconciliation - we need look no
further than Northern Ireland for evidence of that. But
there are multiple ways of addressing the issue of impunity.
Absolving wrong-doers from the national judicial process
does not mean that ways should not be found to confront them
with the reality of their crimes at the international level.
If individuals are not obliged to face up to their actions,
the cycle of impunity will continue unabated. That is why I
urged the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry in Sierra
Leone to investigate and assess human rights and
humanitarian law violations and abuses. In addition, my
Office is working to support the setting up of an
independent national human rights institution and a Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. More recently I have called
for the establishment of an international Commission of
Inquiry into gross human rights violations in East Timor.
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
In crisis
situations we tend to think of civil and political rights
only, but there can be no talk of genuine preventive
strategies without addressing economic, social and cultural
rights. Violations of these rights are widespread and are
among the worst in the world. Over a billion people live in
extreme poverty, the majority of them women and children.
How can we expect democratic societies to flourish if access
to food, water, education and even basic healthcare is
denied? Yet the problems of marginalisation, of extreme
poverty, of economic and social imbalances within and
between countries are getting worse, not better.
I
was interested to hear the economist Jeffrey Sachs call
recently for "a new creativity and a new partnership between
rich and poor". Sachs argued that the G8 debt relief
proposals which are to be implemented soon ought to be no
more than a beginning in efforts to reduce the crippling
debt burden of the most indebted countries. He contrasted
the response to AIDS in resource-rich countries, where great
advances have been made, with the AIDS epidemic which is
raging in developing countries. And he called for a
mobilisation of global science and technology to address the
crises of public health, agricultural productivity,
environmental degradation and demographic stress confronting
the poorest countries of the world.
New, imaginative
approaches of this kind will be essential if economic social
and cultural rights are to be secured. The need for fresh
thinking is particularly acute because different challenges
are appearing all the time. Foremost among these is the
impact of globalisation which has made transnational
corporations more powerful in some respects than national
governments. One of my aims is to engage the business
community in ensuring respect for human rights. There are
positive signs that some business leaders are genuinely
committed to improving their companies' record in this area
by identifying and accepting their responsibility and taking
practical steps to meet it.
Conclusion
Human
rights are directly relevant to how we shape our future.
That is shown by the fact that the tough issues are now at
the forefront of public debate and that human rights values
are invoked in tackling domestic violence, asylum seekers
and refugees, and ethical problems arising from scientific
advances. We must face the challenges that lie ahead with
courage. Recently I was invited to write a foreword to a
publication of women's writing on human rights called A Map
of Hope. It was edited by a Chilean poet, Marjorie Agasin,
who explained:
"A Map of Hope was born because of a
passionate desire to bring to witness the atrocities faced
by women since the beginning of the century - indeed, since
the beginning of time. I also wanted to show through the
voices of women throughout the world the power to heal
through words as well as the power of resistance".
I
carry this book with me now and draw strength from it.
I come back to Seamus Heaney's words about East
Timor: yes, we all felt the pity and terror of the tragedy,
but there was something more, "a feeling of being called
upon, of being in some way answerable". We are all
answerable.
ENDS