The Green Party in England and Wales' Conference has just adopted policy which will make oppresion just that little bit less prevalent. Now to persuade the other Green Parties around the world to take it up, and all the Human Rights NGOs, and then the UN itself...
Here is what we adopted:
UN Index of Human Rights
Synopsis.
In order to reduce the amount of torture, political imprisonment, disappearances and other human rights abuses worldwide, the Green Party will call for the world's governments to have their performance on human rights monitored and published regularly, with a view to bringing legal and non-violent pressure on the regimes with the very worst human rights records.
Motion.
Prevention of human rights abuses, conflict prevention and resolution, promotion of sustainable human development, coordination of humanitarian aid should be the primary roles of the U.N.
Human Rights Index
The international community cannot stand back and allow gross human rights abuses to take place. The emergent Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine promises to legitimise UN intervention in cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide. However, military intervention should always be a last resort, as modern wars inevitably cause death and injury to civilians, and the post conflict situation may be problematical.
Therefore the Green Party will press for the use of a United Nations Index of Human Rights to monitor governments that commit human rights abuses and to provide an explicit basis for seeking to restrain such regimes.
All governments will have their human rights record continuously assessed by a UN agency set up for that purpose. A scale will be established measuring several indicators of human rights performance. The scale will be finalised by agreement at the UN level, but will be centred on the following abuses:
· use of torture
· use of death penalty
· scale of ‘disappearances’
· abuse of political prisoners
· denial of right to fair trial
· denial of free speech
· denial of free movement
· denial of right to political or religious freedom
· denial of rights to women
· denial of child rights
· denial of minority rights.
A score reflecting their performance will be allocated to each state on an annual basis.
Once the Index is installed, Governments with the worst record of human rights as measured on this Index will be referred to the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court. If the Court finds that their human rights performance falls below accepted legal standards, the regimes will be given time and assistance to improve their record. In the event of non-compliance, the matter will return to the Court, and if found at fault, the regime will suffer penalties in terms of its member’s privileges in the fields of finance, diplomacy, transport and trade. The severity of the penalties will increase as their human rights performance deteriorates, and decrease as their human rights performance improves. The penalties will be targeted to hurt the ruling elite rather than the general population.
At the same time, countries lying just above the level at which legal action will be taken will be offered help and advice to improve their human rights performance.
[end of GP policy]
The effects of such an Index would be:
1. A general tendency towards improved human rights performance. Governments, even tyrannical ones, are sensitive to public opinion, as evidenced by the success of Amnesty International's letter writing campaigns over individual cases. There will be a natural desire to rate more highly on the scale.
2. All parties know where they stand. At present, tyrants are dealt with in an arbitrary and ad hoc way. The demonisation of a particular tyrant (prior to waging war) will be less easy to do if everyone knows that he is only, say, 6th from the bottom on the Index.
3. Governments will doubtless appeal against their ratings. The UN can send in inspectors to review the conditions in the country. Regimes will tend to release prisoners and improve other conditions prior to the appeals inspection.
4. Some governments may accept advice and assistance in improving their human rights performance, and hence their position on the Index.
5. Finally, when the Index is established, it can be used to bring specific legal action and targeted sanctions to bear on the very worst offenders.
The proposal is set out in more detail here
Friday, September 16, 2005
UN Summit: Responsibility to Protect and the Index of Human Rights
One of the positive outcomes from the United Nations Summit in September 2005 was an agreement on Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which commits the UN to taking action to protect people from such crimes as ethnic cleansing and genocide.
This establishes the principle that governments have a duty to protect their citizens’ lives and rights, and if they fail to do so, or indeed if a government is actually committing those crimes, it loses its legitimacy and that the community of nations will take on that protection role even if it means infringing the sovereignty of the state.
This is an important and historic step, a change to the concept of sovereignty that can be traced back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. No-one who cares about humanity can mourn the demise of the idea that regimes can do exactly as they please with those who lie in their power, but on the other hand, both the environment and the way in which R2P will be worked out needs close inspection and modification.
The problem is that R2P can be seen as giving legitimacy to the disastrous kind of intervention which Bush and Blair led us into in Iraq. Invasions are not a practical answer; the challenge is to apply the brakes on regimes that are setting off down the slippery slope that leads to widespread human rights abuses and genocide. We must act early and non-violently, because to act late and violently can make the situation worse.
Historians can trace the development from authoritarian tendencies, through repression of political opposition with arbitrary imprisonment, disappearances and torture, to ethnic cleansing and genocidal warfare. It is clear therefore that the international community needs to be able to identify states which are embarking on that course, and to find, through the UN, ways to bring pressure that will persuade them that repression is bad for business.
First, we need to identify the people most at risk of committing ever worse human rights abuses. There is no lack of data on this – the shelves of the UN are groaning with reports on governmental performance in many areas, including that of human rights. The trouble with reports is that they are rarely read except by experts and professionals, so the information is in effect hidden from public consciousness. To overcome this problem, it is possible to codify the report findings, and use those figures to create a ranking system which will express the human rights performance of all governments at a glance. This has been worked out in several examples, notably in the Observer Index of Human Rights in the 1990s.
This Index of Human Rights will give the international community, and more importantly the new UN Human Rights Council, early warning of states most at risk of creating an R2P crisis in the future. As a result, the UN will be able to pay attention to those states, offering both carrot and stick to help them clean up their acts.
This programme will meet with difficulty in the form of political resistance from abusive and potentially abusive regimes, but the alternative - a continuing free-for-all in human rights abuses, punctuated by intermittent Iraq-style interventions, would be much more difficult.
This establishes the principle that governments have a duty to protect their citizens’ lives and rights, and if they fail to do so, or indeed if a government is actually committing those crimes, it loses its legitimacy and that the community of nations will take on that protection role even if it means infringing the sovereignty of the state.
This is an important and historic step, a change to the concept of sovereignty that can be traced back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. No-one who cares about humanity can mourn the demise of the idea that regimes can do exactly as they please with those who lie in their power, but on the other hand, both the environment and the way in which R2P will be worked out needs close inspection and modification.
The problem is that R2P can be seen as giving legitimacy to the disastrous kind of intervention which Bush and Blair led us into in Iraq. Invasions are not a practical answer; the challenge is to apply the brakes on regimes that are setting off down the slippery slope that leads to widespread human rights abuses and genocide. We must act early and non-violently, because to act late and violently can make the situation worse.
Historians can trace the development from authoritarian tendencies, through repression of political opposition with arbitrary imprisonment, disappearances and torture, to ethnic cleansing and genocidal warfare. It is clear therefore that the international community needs to be able to identify states which are embarking on that course, and to find, through the UN, ways to bring pressure that will persuade them that repression is bad for business.
First, we need to identify the people most at risk of committing ever worse human rights abuses. There is no lack of data on this – the shelves of the UN are groaning with reports on governmental performance in many areas, including that of human rights. The trouble with reports is that they are rarely read except by experts and professionals, so the information is in effect hidden from public consciousness. To overcome this problem, it is possible to codify the report findings, and use those figures to create a ranking system which will express the human rights performance of all governments at a glance. This has been worked out in several examples, notably in the Observer Index of Human Rights in the 1990s.
This Index of Human Rights will give the international community, and more importantly the new UN Human Rights Council, early warning of states most at risk of creating an R2P crisis in the future. As a result, the UN will be able to pay attention to those states, offering both carrot and stick to help them clean up their acts.
This programme will meet with difficulty in the form of political resistance from abusive and potentially abusive regimes, but the alternative - a continuing free-for-all in human rights abuses, punctuated by intermittent Iraq-style interventions, would be much more difficult.
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