Forty-ninth session

6 August 1997

Non-governmental organizations alleged serious human rights violations in numerous countries as the Subcommission carried on with its annual consideration of the status of such rights and fundamental freedoms around the world.

NGO representatives, frequently calling for Subcommission action in response, charged human rights abuses in Colombia, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Algeria, Mexico, Chad, Bahrain, Philippines, Angola and Belarus.

Among a number of organizations expressing concern over conditions in Turkey was International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which contended that police torture was widespread and that journalists and writers in the country regularly were prosecuted for questioning Government policies on the Kurdish question. Habitat International Coalition called for an end to alleged abuses committed by Turkish Government troops against the country's Kurds, including destruction of villages.

The situation in Colombia was referred to several times, with the American Association of Jurists maintaining that violence there was pervasive and extreme; that peasants were deprived of their lands; that wealth was increasingly concentrated in a few hands; that democratic and judicial channels ware closed to most of the population; and that rural and other political movements were repressed by armed landowners' gangs, paramilitary groups, drugtrafficking forces, and Government armed forces. The Association urged a Subcommission resolution calling for dissolution of Government-supported paramilitary groups and for steps to enable the holding of free and fair elections.