JAMES DILLOWAY

Human Rights and their Ramifications

FOLLOWING the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, various priorities have emerged: e.g. to move towards full ratification of basic contractual instruments; to raise the unacceptable status of women in the world; to upgrade economic, social and cultural rights to an equality with civil and political rights; and to make more effective the implementing and enforcement of human rights -through action by monitoring bodies, preventive diplomacy, coordination with peace-keeping, NGO activity and development promotion. A permanent High Commissioner for Human Rights has just been appointed.

The whole concept involves a synthesis of world affairs. Its context is that we are at an end-of-century climax, still officially unrecognised. If one in nine workers in the EEC is unemployed, the far more extreme level of poverty and deprivation world-wide stands in a similar ratio to the whole. One in four of the world's population is illiterate. One in five lacks basic health care, proper shelter, is permanently hungry and falls below even a minimum poverty line. As I have shown elsewhere, indictable crime in the UK has been rising at around three times the rate of economic growth for fifty years at least. World-wide, crime has been rising at over five per cent per year for many years, i.e. at double the growth in population. New reports suggest that one in four children under 3 in the USA grow up in poverty. But, despite a lack of political ‘enemies', 600 billion US dollars are still spent every year, world-wide, on a largely secret trade in arms!

The effects of this are felt directly in proliferating human communities. As I write I have just come from a Preparatory Committee for the coming World Conference on Human Settlements, addressed by the UN Secretary General. In a few years most of the world's people will live in cities and urban areas. But already crises in water supply, traffic and pollution, plus 45 million refugees or displaced persons and rapidly-growing aged and dependent populations, all challenge existing measures even to maintain the status quo!

And so to action on Human Rights at the Commission's fiftieth session. Of 109 resolutions, 25 dealt with rights violations in particular countries, or special situations like that of the former Yugoslavia. There were participants from 135 states, plus Switzerland, and 150 NGOs.

I shall not report on national situations and can only select major issues from the 75 resolutions and decisions. States were called on to tighten up or create laws and procedures; accede where necessary to human rights instruments; to refrain from coercive measures against other states; to enforce, with fewer derogations, the binding Conventions they have ratified; and to report regularly, in person, on their performance to the Commission's various monitoring bodies.

Matters of interest here can be grouped into certain clusters. They include several major rights problems of severely disadvantaged groups - e.g. women, children, migrant workers, indigenous peoples, people with HIV/AIDS, ethnic or linguistic minorities, internally displaced persons and those suffering extreme poverty. Particular attention is being given also to the implementing of economic, social and cultural rights world-wide, as a key neglected area. Religious intolerance, racism, torture, summary executions and human rights and the environment are other key perennial issues that pervade the world scene.

Let us start with economic, social and cultural rights, which includes some subsidiary questions, like the right to adequate housing and third-world debt-service problems. One reason for the attention now given to this area is that much of the international community, including many in the Commission or Sub-Commission of experts and also non-governmental organizations, strongly believe that the current policies and philosophies of three UN financial institutions are quite futile and wrong-headed in dealing with global development.

AS WIEU representative, I said that powerful dogmas associated with authoritarian religion, political economy and government, plus the existence of a secret but magnetizing trade in arms, decided conditions for exercising economic and social rights and determined development priorities. The world was focused on a non-viable economic and governmental frame. Those economic and social rights that underpinned the development sought now could flourish only if conditions were deliberately created to make their exercise possible. Unfettered struggle for growth simply lifted productivity, cut employment, created poverty, raised crime, lowered capital investment and destroyed environments. Some convergence between philosophies of East and West - with an open concern for meeting common needs and individual wants within a perceived framework of justice - seemed the condition for success if rights and duties were truly to advance human development. Why should states who paid little heed to ratifying basic rights instruments be able to vote in or dominate the Security Council? When would there be a Council for Economic Security?'

Among main decisions, it was resolved to arrange a comprehensive meeting of the heads of rights-monitoring bodies, UN agencies, NGOs and the UN's international financial organs, such as the IME to clarify the special content of economic and social rights and the obligations of states ratifying that Convention. Another decision was that debt repayments should not take precedence over basic rights to food, shelter, clothing, employment, health services or healthy environment. Although, a wide vindication of the IHEU intervention!

Other major areas of concern were the Rights of the Child, with horrendous problems in that field; and Women's Rights, equally critical where poverty or religion are involved. One welcome development in this area has been the IHEU's comprehensive resolution of 1993 on Genital Mutilation of Females. As a member of the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting Health of Women and Children, I arranged for this resolution to be published in this Committee's Newsletter, so that it will circulate widely in Africa and elsewhere. At the Commission session Mrs. Berhane Ras-Werk, the President, made a strong intervention stressing that these practices violated binding Conventions on the Child and on Discrimination Against Women. It was decided to draw up a final action plan to eliminate such practices, as well as draft guidelines for a future Convention to eradicate sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. It asked governments to cooperate closely with INTERPOL on the matter. As to the plight of street children and those affected by armed conflict or antipersonnel mines, an expert is to study this issue.

In a resolution on integrating the rights of women into the human rights mechanisms of the United Nations, the Commission condemned all violations of the human rights of women, including acts of gender-based violence; called for the elimination of gender-based violence in the family, within the community and where perpetrated or condoned by the state; condemned all violations of the human rights of women in situations of armed conflict; recognized them to be violations of international human rights and humanitarian law; and called for an effective response to violations of this kind, including in particular murder, systematic rape, sexual slavery and forced pregnancy. It decided to appoint, for a three-year period, a special rapporteur on violence against women, including its causes and its consequences, who would report on an annual basis.

This brief outline of a few selected items from a small part only of year-long preoccupations at Geneva may serve to show that humanist concerns are all-embracing -- that they are practical as well as ethical or theoretical. Despite a lack, so far, of political power to enforce agreed priorities, a slow educative process battles constantly for humanness - guarded and transmitted by feminine values - as against the newly-stressed adversarial stance that is mainly a masculine contribution. Values are important in all this effort.

Some years ago the Indian Secular Society produced a draft Declaration of Human Values. It languished until I ventured to amend it slightly for international usage, and to submit the amended version for consideration to a Preparatory Committee for the World Conference on Human Rights. Something near to that version is at present in use in India, but recently an IHEU working group - of which I have been a member - started to attempt an agreed international Declaration. While I have not been kept informed of the more recent results, what I did see seemed - from an international standpoint- to be inferior to the original version. The effort to draft a definitive instrument of this kind seems worthwhile and important, and it is to be hoped that a realistic, science-based and unsentimental statement will eventually be realised.