Jayne Innes
Human Rights Action? (from the Morning Star)
Geneva was once a city state and gradually became absorbed into Switzerland. Due to its neutrality it has always been a centre for meetings, congresses and international institutions. The city is full of them, which gives it the strange combination of hope that war can be ended, and despair; it was here that the League of Nations failed to prevent the fascist occupation of Abyssinia.
This year, as every spring, hundreds of delegates descend on this wealthy and self satisfied city for the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The UN Conference Centre is a 1950’s marble and glass extension of the 1920’s brutal concrete League of Nations construction.
The Commission follows a normal format with State representatives seated in a horseshoe formation in front of the President, all of who get fifteen minutes to speak, followed down the pecking order by observers to the Non Governmental Organisations with observer status, who are reduced to three minutes.
The whole session goes on for a month but has a theme. This time the theme was post the Durban declaration on what has actually been done by member states.
All state’s open their submission by saying how much they support all the declarations to end all forms of discrimination and are taking action themselves.
In one short burst last Monday the full range of opinions on human rights was addressed. The US principle delegate gave an almost off the cuff performance. A self made businessman who came to the US from Vietnam in the 1960’s, told a rather sceptical audience that the free market model showed how discrimination was not an issue, it was all about economic opportunity. He started out poor, has made it, and his children are all in college because he can afford it. He did not say anything about the forty million Americans without access to health care. This rather strange interpretation of the Durban process, to counteract racism and xenophobia, followed a Chinese representative who essentially asserted that human rights are about the collective good, as well as access to health, housing, food and education being central.
Next up came the Cubans (one twentieth the population of the USA) who pointed out that forty nine per cent of all prisoners were Afro American and that forty per cent of those facing the death penalty were also Afro Americans, with a chilling figure that there was a fifteen times greater chance of being executed for a capital offence if you were a black American, rather than a white.
The US used their right of reply to hit back at Cuba, but never dealt with the illegal nature of the blockade, or the prison in Guantanamo Bay.
In the same session the Indian Government, stung by the Commission’s reports and many non Governmental Groups who had raised the question of caste, suggested that the UN should “shine its light elsewhere”. This seemed to be an invitation to look at other problems because caste discrimination was rooted in 3000 years of history. The UN special representative on the issue, from Senegal, hit back tersely to remind the Commission that caste was a form of discrimination and it existed in his own country as well as India and Japan; and that it is wrong.
Ireland speaks on behalf of the EU and gave a lengthy and very well written statement about the acceptance of the Durban declaration and all the anti discrimination measures that are part of European law.
I am in Geneva on behalf of Liberation, the anti racist and anti imperialist organisation that owes its antecedents to the Movement for Colonial Freedom founded by Fenner Brockway in 1954.
We pointed out that for all these statements the reality is that Europe can be a cold, hard and unforgiving place as national governments appease populist newspapers and racist pressure by treating asylum seekers abominably. Those that are able to receive any kind of benefit are limited to seventy per cent of income support. Those appealing against a refusal get no benefit at all, and end up homeless and destitute, reliant on begging or charity whilst wanting to work legally, and many are sent back to the society they thought they had escaped from where their dangers are increased.
As if this is not bad enough, the development of laws designed to oppose terrorism are in reality targeted against specific groups. Under UN Human Rights declarations, the operation of Guantanamo Bay is certainly illegal, and in order to bring in the Special Immigration Appeals Tribunal under which foreign nationals own Governments can act, they have had to seek derogation from the Human Rights Convention.
Europe and America are often, quite rightly, critical of discrimination and racism that exists in many parts of the world, but need to be told in no uncertain terms that the growth of the far right is a response to social pressures, and the policies of appeasement.
The Commission, for all its isolation from the real world in comfortable Geneva, is not immune from the immediate. The assassination in Gaza of the Hamas leader (Sheikh Yassin) brought an immediate meeting of the Islamic Countries, and a demand for a special session on the plight of the Palestinian people. A poignant reminder that without justice for the Palestinian people there will never be peace or release from the occupation. The politics of state assassination are as much a denial of human rights as any.
In Geneva, at enormous expense and trouble, groups travel from many countries where their normal social and political rights are denied, and eyeball their own Government’s who try to ignore them. Thus the Colombian Government, in the same room as their own human rights groups, tell the world that they are opposed to all forms of systematic discrimination. Yet they represent a country where Trade Unionists and Human Rights advocates face routine assassination.
The International Labour Organisation also has its office in Geneva, and their submission concerning employment discrimination pointed out that the vulnerability of migrant communities to debt bondage, removed their employment rights. Denial of human rights comes from blind prejudice, unaccountable military power, and an economically imbalanced world. The Human Rights Commission will not solve all this, only universal popular action will ensure that, but it does provide a forum to embarrass and demand justice.
