SUNS  4344 Monday 14 December 1998



UNITED NATIONS: 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF DECLARATION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

United Nations, Dec 10 (IPS/Farhan Haq) -- Human rights activists, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, Thursday urged all nations to continue the fight against impunity.

"Throughout this year, from the streets of Asia to the towns of Africa to the courts of Europe, justice has been done and freedom has been won," said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

"Truly, this year has been worthy of the anniverary we mark today, and proven to all that human rights cannot be denied where human beings live and breathe."

Annan paid tribute to the gains in human rights over the past half century by naming former U.S.President Jimmy Carter and four other activists as the winners of the 1998 U.N. Human Rights Prizes.

Among victories celebrated was the decision 24 hours ago by the British government to allow the extradition of former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet to proceed so that he can be tried in Spain for crimes against humanity committed during his rule. Amnesty International said that "human rights defenders the world over could not have wished for a better reaffirmation of the principles contained in the Declaration."

U.N. officials, however, cautioned that recent successes in the field of human rights - including the decision by governments in Rome last July to create an International Criminal Court to try individuals for  genocide and crimes against humanity - should not obscure challenges that still remained.

"Our task now must be implementation: to close the gap between rhetoric and reality," said Mary Robinson, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. "The international community's record in responding to, let alone preventing, gross human rights abuses does not give grounds for encouragement ... Genocide and mass killing have happened again - and have happened before the eyes of all of us - in Rwanda, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and other parts of the globe."

Robinson also noted that the Universal Declaration, which was approved by only 48 nations in 1948 with eight abstentions, included not only civil and political rights, but economic and social ones which often have been ignored.

"We speak of the right to development, but what is the actual situation?" she asked. "Twenty percent of the world's population own in excess of 80 percent of the wealth and consume 80 percent of the world's resources."

"Today should be a day of shame for many governments," Pierre Sane, director-general of Amnesty International, argued at the U.N. commemoration of the Declaration. "At least 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day; 117 governments torture their citizens; at least 55 governments unlawfully kill their citizens; (and) at least 87 governments jail prisoners of conscience."

The anniversary nevertheless has been a time to celebrate gains in human rights as well as the challenges. The United Nations conferred one of its 1998 Human Rights Prizes to "all human rights defenders all over the world" and honoured President Carter and four others for their special contributions.

Carter was honoured for his work with the Georgia-based Carter Centre on behalf of human rights, from defending religious minorities in Eastern Europe to resolving Liberia's civil war and campaigning to eradicate river blindness.

The other awardees included Jose Gregori, head of Brazil's National Secretariat for Human Rights; Anna Sabatova, founding member of the Czech group 'Charter 77'; Angelina Acheng Atyam, a Ugandan activist who has worked to release children kidnapped by the rebel Lord's Resistance
Army; and Sunila Abeyesekera, executive director of the Sri Lankan rights group 'Inform'.

Many of the awardees of the prize, which is given every five years, also pointed to advances in rights in their own nations. Gregori praised Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso for establishing a law for those who disappeared during the Brazilian military regime over the previous decade. "This law recognises the responsibility of the state and the possibility for economic reparations to the families of people who disappeared during the regime," he noted.

Ironically, at the same time that a former U.S. president was being conferred a human rights award by the United Nations, some activists took the United States to task for lagging behind on human rights issues.

"The United States likes to think of itself as a leader in the field of human rights," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "But on some of the key human rights issues, the United States lags behind."

Roth urged the U.S. government to support the newly-established International Criminal Court and last year's Ottawa Convention to ban landmines, as well as to give public support to the extradition and trial of Pinochet.

The Lawyers Committee on Human Rights used the Thursday celebrations to push for changes in U.S. asylum laws, which the New York-based group claimed undermines the right to asylum by those fleeing persecution worldwide.

Amchock Thubten Gyamtso, a Buddhist monk who won asylum in the United States after fleeing Tibet, urged Washington to change rules passed since a 1996 law which limits asylum claims among other measures to restrict immigration.