Wednesday 10 December 1997

Rights and Wrongs, Edward Mortimer

Today marks the start of the 50th year of the Universal Declaration Human Rights. We can expect to hear a lot about human rights over the next 12 months.

In fact, human rights are a growth industry. The number of organisations monitoring human rights has risen since the end of the cold war, as has the number of governments, intergovernmental agencies and even commercial companies that claim to include human rights in their policies. As with other kinds crime, a rise in the statistics may reflect more intensive reporting rather than an increase in the actual number of violations. Certainly, the likelihood of violations going undetected or being completely ignored has diminished. And that must be good news.

So visible are human rights these days that Robin Cook, the UK foreign secretary, began his term office in May by announcing that his government would '.put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy' This bold, if not fool hard pledge seems to have cut little ice with Human Rights Watch, the US-based independent monitoring group*. In its annual World Report, published last week, HRW still treats the UK as one of the villains of the piece, alongside other "major powers".

It describes UK support for the treaty banning landmines as "reluctant". 0n the proposed international criminal court it concedes that "the UK's position changed measurably after Labour's electoral victory (unlike that of France which was "especially obstructionist" before and after the change of government). But it adds that "substantive changes have lagged behind the Labour party's professions of support".

The US, however, is the main target of the report. Apologists for China and some third world governments often speak as if the US had invented human rights as a pretext for interfering in other countries' affairs. But HRW sees things differently. Not only was the US government "particularly conspicuous" in its, tolerance of grave human rights violations in central Africa this year. It also showed "arrogance" by seeking "to block the strengthening of human rights standards and institutions" while refusing to let even existing standards be applied to its own performance.

US practice says the report, "falls short of international standards" in such areas as police abuse, treatment of prisoners, abuse by the Border Patrol, treatment of asylum-seekers, and application of the death penalty. The US is one of only six countries (the others being Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) that execute people for acts committed before the age of 18.

Nor does it any longer welcome "huddled masses yearning to be free". Asylum-seekers who reach the US without proper travel documents are now sent home after a "cursory review", while others, including children, are often detained "in high security facilities with prison-like conditions". Here, alas, the US is in more "respectable" company, since both summary removal and detention of asylum-seekers are also, widespread in the EU.

The US refusal to sign last week's landmines treaty has been well-publicised. What is less well known is that, while proclaiming its support for the idea of an international criminal court, the US has "insisted on various restrictions that would weaken the court's independence and effectiveness". It has done so with the apparent aim of "avoiding even the remotest possibility that an American soldier, pilot or political leader might end up in the dock".

More bizarrely, the US is one of only two countries (the other being Somalia, which does not even have a recognised government) not to have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Likewise it "stands virtually alone" in opposing a ban on the use of children under 18 as soldiers, apparently because "the Pentagon finds it somewhat easier to reach its enlistment goals if it entices 17-year-olds to sign up for military service".

The true champion of human rights, according to HRW, is not the US, nor any of the "major powers" (all guilty of putting their own economic and strategic interests first), but a "new global partnership" in which non-governmental organisations such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (this year's Nobel Peace prize-winner) join forces with small and medium-sized states from both north and south. If, as now seems likely, a treaty establishing an international criminal court is signed next year, it will be largely thanks to the support of southern governments, many of which "have completed transitions from authoritarian to democratic government". This gives the lie to the widespread perception that human rights are a northern agenda, unfairly targeting the south.

In the landmines case, a Treaty has been achieved because those who wanted one, led by Canada, decided to ditch the UNs "consensus" approach and confront the US with a choice: "Accept an unconditional ban or face the ensuing opprobrium."

HRW suggests the international community should now take a similar approach in other human rights negotiations. This would involve "simply leaving the US behind" and letting it catch up later - as it did after 40 years with the Genocide Convention, whose 49th birthday also falls this week.