Fwd: Human Rights Defenders (from Digest hr-news.v001.n172)
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Sat, 7 Mar 1998 12:06:42 +0200 (EET)
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Subject: Fwd: Human Rights Defenders (from Digest hr-news.v001.n172)
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Original sender: Britt Elliott <[email protected]>
Fwd: Human Rights Defenders (from Digest hr-news.v001.n172)
This message appeared on the mailing list HR-news. It contains some
news on the Human Rights Defenders Declaration I mentioned on this
list last month.
Britt
PS. Many thanks to all those NGOs who signed onto Human Rights
Internet's appeal on Human Rights Defenders. I think that of all the
listservs I wrote, MINELRES-L brought in the largest number of
responses.
--------------- MESSAGE hr-news.v001.n172.5 ---------------
From: Margarita Lacabe <[email protected]>
HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDER DECLARATION AGRED UPON
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 12:53:48 -0800 (PST)
From: Curtis Doebbler <[email protected]>
HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDER DECLARATION AGREED UPON
At about 2 a.m. in the morning on 4 March 1998, the United Nations
Working Group Drafting a Declaration on Human Rights Defenders
reached consensus on a the text for the declaration.
The text reiterates the existing rights that every individual has to
protect human rights making special reference to the fact that these
rights apply to human rights defenders.
The text does not define who or what a "human rights defender" is,
although the proceedings of the Working Group appear to concentrate
on NGOs and not individuals.
While caution was taken not to restrict existing rights, the declaration
does include restatements of existing human rights in language that
might be viewed more restrictively by states.
Additionally, the declaration includes references to individuals' duties
towards their community and their obligations under national law, but
it hardly mentions the individuals' responsibilities to ensure respect for
international human rights law.
A major omission, in this writer's view, is the declaration's failure to
include explicite language encouraging all individuals to take up their
responsibility (already established in the preambles of all three
instruments of the International Bill of Rights) to protect and promote
other individuals' human rights. The declaration, in fact, includes very
little aspirational or inspirational language.
While numerous NGOs participated in the drafting they were careful
to explain that they did not agree with many of the compromises and
that it was the government's who were the authoritative decision
makers.
This text comes after 13 years of debate and negotiations and it
contains numerous compromises. On 5 March the Working Group
will meet to adopt the text. After this it will be sent to the
Commission on Human Rights which meets for six week in March
and April, probably to the ECOSOC in August and eventually to the
United Nations General Assembly where the member states will
formally adopt it as a Declaration of the organization. As a
Declaration it will command more respect than a resolution, but it is
not a legally binding instrument.
Due to the controversey surrounding the compromises in this
declaration, the lack of inspritational language and the possibility that
its 'rights' might be interpreted more restrictively and its duties more
expansively it should be relied on with great caution.
-------------------------
These are the comments of Curtis Francis Doebber, an international
human rights lawyer. To find out more about Curtis Doebbler please
consult his web site: http://dcregistrz.com/homepages/curtis.html.
It is a sevrice provided by the Vereniging Humanitaire Projekten which
is an informal NGO under Dutch law.
--
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