Letter to QUNO from Meeting for
Worship for Ukraine Draft 1.4
Dear Friends
We are a group of about 100 friends from many nations, who have been
meeting daily online over the last month out of our concern for the situation
in Ukraine which has impinged on the human rights of so many people.
We recognise that the invasion of Ukraine is the result of a large
number of interrelated factors operating on both sides of the divide.
After discussion and consideration, we wish to draw to your attention a
simple measure which would provide a continuous and universal incentive
for every Government to improve its human rights (HR) performance.
This is that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights, (OHCHR) should publish annually the contents of the Universal
Human Rights Index in tabular form, providing an accessible listing which would
summarise the HR performance in the previous year of all Governments, give
their relative position in the range of governmental performance, and give an
indication of whether their performance is static, improving or worsening.
This is a modest development of the presentation of the Universal Human
Rights Index data already present in the UN website.
The effect of this measure will be to take the HR data out of the
recesses of the UN website, known only to students of the UN, simplify
it, and bring it forward into the public domain, so that anyone considering
travelling to, or doing business with, a particular country, will be able to
form a reasonably accurate impression of its HR performance at a glance, with
the facility of digging deeper into the data as necessary.
We therefore recommend this measure to QUNO for your consideration. We
recognise that you will need to explore and weigh up and test the proposal in
detail and we provide a summary of our discussion in the Appendix to this
letter.
With grateful recognition of your valuable work
In friendship
(Signed)…………….
RANKED HUMAN RIGHTS INDEX (RHRI) : DISCUSSION
The virtual meeting convened by Friends House Moscow has
discussed the GloHRI proposal in a number of sessions. This is a summary of the
main points raised in these discussions.
Description of the RHRI
The proposal is that the Human Rights (HR) performance of every
government should be quantified and presented in ranked order and tabular form
by the UN, refreshed annually.
The aim of the RHRI is to provide a gentle, continuous, and
universal incentive for all governments to improve their HR performance, to
reduce the tendency to form into dictatorships, and therefore to reduce the
likelihood of a repetition of the invasion of Ukraine.
This aim will be realised by publicising the relative human
rights performance of all regimes. At present this data exists on the UN
website in searchable form, the Universal Human Rights Index - https://uhri.ohchr.org/en/search-human-rights-recommendations. RHRI brings this data forward, making it far more
accessible, and makes the relative position of each government clear.
The fact that countries are positioned in ranked order will almost
certainly evoke complaints from some governments that they have been placed too
low in the table. The UN Human Rights Commission can respond by sending in
rapporteurs to review the position. While waiting for the rapporteurs to visit,
it is very likely that governments will discharge political prisoners and take
other actions to improve their position in the Index.
One accepted principle of effective behaviour management is
consistency. At present, unwanted behaviour in the international community is
responded to on an ad hoc basis, with peers condemning or defending the
behaviour according to subjective criteria such as political positioning and
trade relations. The RHRI system introduces a measure of objectivity to the
international relations environment.
States who are placed low on the Index ranking can be
offered constructive advice, being advised, for instance, that allowing a
diversity to media and freedom of journalism does not necessarily provide an
existential threat to them. This approach offers an evolutionary pathway away
from dictatorship towards democracy, and is an attractive alternative to
revolution, coup, or invasion, which are the other ways that a dictatorship may
come to an end. Iraq and Libya show that a violent termination of a
dictatorship does not necessarily end well.
It is possible that the very lowest functioning states could
be subjected to a tariff of sanctions targeted on the ruling circles. The
problem here is that if the tariff is too stringent, and/or the number of sanctioned
states should be too numerous, the integrity of the international community
could be threatened. The UN always has to balance the need to maintain unity
with the need to influence behaviour in a positive way.
The relative movement of the score for each country is an
important parameter, both with regard to the country’s performance in previous years
and in regard to its position in the rankings.
It should be noted that RHRI is a useful adjunct , to the
Responsibility to Protect, which otherwise has little power short of war.
Some questions raised in discussion
Many were supportive,
some had questions, and a few found the proposal contentious
How can qualitative descriptions be reduced to a single
number?
Academic
institutions have been practicing this method successfully for many years. There
are a variety of indices for measuring human development, freedom and
corruption. The Ibrahim Index of African Governance has been functioning for
many years. https://mo.ibrahim.foundation/iiag
Would abusive countries not just ignore their ranking?
Esteem
is very important to humans, possibly more so for some personality types who
get themselves in positions of leadership. It remains to be seen how each will
respond.
What should be measured in the Index?
The present proposal is that the characteristics measured in
the present UN Universal Index of Human rights should be used. This would
require summarisation and quantification.
What is the relationship between HR observance and
democracy?
It may be supposed that democracies generally have better HR
performance than autocracies, but this is
a matter that deserves further study. It is expedient to keep HR performance
and democratic performance under separate consideration in order to avoid reducing
acceptance of the Index. “Democracy” is often spoken of in public as a binary
thing, but the reality is that democracies exist on a spectrum from strong to
weak, good to imperfect.
Is there a model of this proposal in action?
A model of this approach can be seen in the Ibrahim Index of
African Governance https://iiag.online/data.html.
It is wider in scope than the ranked Index of Human Rights, but is using the
principle of quantification and presentation in tabular form.
There are a number of other approaches to measuring Governments’
HR performance, notably the Political Terror Scale https://www.politicalterrorscale.org/Data/
which classifies states into 5 categories.
Discussion continues
.
