Despite various bright moments in the past year, in 2006 the cause of human rights continued to be undercut by the very countries that should be leading the way. It is difficult for a human rights violator to be an effective advocate for human rights human decency.
Bringing the perpetrators of international crimes to justice is an important step along the path towards civilisation. By resisting any international trial of American personnel no matter what the crime, and promoting what British former-Lord Justice Steyn described as ‘Kangaroo Courts’ in Guantanamo Bay, the Bush Administration continues to act as a dead weight in this area.
Despite this, 2006 has seen us reach some notable milestones. Charles Taylor is the former Liberian president charged with ordering hundreds of rapes on Valentine’s Day 1998. His trial was moved from Sierra Leone to the Hague, with Britain promising a prison cell if he is convicted. November saw the case begin against Momcilo Mandic, justice minister in the government of Radovan Karadzic. Wiretap telephone evidence will be used to prove his role in three prisons where prisoners were tortured by guards.
The prosecution of war crimes has thoroughly infiltrated domestic law as well. The French are seeking to prosecute Rwandan President Paul Kagame for the 1994 killing of former president Juvenal Habyarimana. The murder sparked the country's genocide leading to some 800,000 deaths, and the French claim jurisdiction because the plane’s crew were from France. Prosecutors have already authorized arrest warrants for nine senior Rwandan officials.
Canada likewise ordered a trial against Desire Munyaneza for his alleged participation in Rwanda's 1994 genocide in November. Meanwhile, the pardons issued in favour of various Argentine Junta leaders were ruled unconstitutional by an Argentine Court, leaving them open to prosecution for various crimes, including kidnapping up to 30,000 people who ‘disappeared’ during the late 1970s, and Spain ordered the arrest of former Argentine police officer Ricardo Taddei for the torture and murder of 160 left wing ‘dissidents’ in secret detention centres.
As prosecutions of officials become more frequent, there are signs that the punishment of less exalted criminals continues to become more humane. In April, Philippine President Arroyo commuted the sentences of all 1,230 prisoners on death row to life imprisonment. In Vietnam, there is a proposal to end executions for several non-violent offences. That said, Le Manh Luong, a British national was sentenced to death in Vietnam just two weeks ago. Meanwhile, in November, another British citizen, Tahir Hussain, was freed by President Musharraf after 18 years on death row. His liberation was largely due to the personal intervention of Prince Charles, then on a state visit to Pakistan.
The general trend away from the death penalty has reached the U.S., where the number of death sentences imposed in 2006 was well under half the number ten years before.
Free speech is a human right that is all too often ignored. The worldwide record has not been good in 2006. President Bush protested that his suggestion to Tony Blair that they should bomb the al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar was a ‘joke’. Most people failed to see the humour, including al Jazeera journalist Sami al Haj, who celebrated his fifth year in U.S. custody in Guantanamo Bay on December 15th, without any charges against him.
The Bush Administration has certainly been setting a bad example to some unsavoury regimes. According to Reporters Without Borders, Axis of Evil candidate North Korea is bottom of the press freedom league table. Turkmenistan comes a close second, and each news bulletin in the country begins with a pledge that the broadcaster's tongue will shrivel if he slanders the country, flag, or the president. Such discord is unlikely, since President Niyazov personally appoints journalists.
Various close allies of the West are not doing much better. The 59th World Newspaper Congress was held in Moscow in June. Four months later, the leading Russian journalist, Anna Politskaya, a powerful critic of President Putin’s Chechen policy, was murdered in her home. Her killers have not yet been identified, despite the existence of video footage of them entering her apartment building. In the same month, there was much less media coverage for a five year sentence, on a charge of ‘inciting ethnic hatred’, of Boris Stomakhin for his coverage of the Chechnyan conflict. His crime was to describe the Russian presence in Chechnya as ‘occupation’ and to compare Putin to Saddam Hussein.
2006 has been a very dangerous year to be a journalist in the Philippines, where at least eight journalists who were working to expose official corruption have been murdered. While there have been 60 journalists murdered in the last ten years, a trial of three men in October for the murder of the journalist Marlene Esperat led to only the fourth conviction. Meanwhile Jose Miguel Arroyo, the husband of President Gloria Arroyo, has brought 43 separate actions against journalists for libel; they have clubbed together to sue him in a class action for trying to chill free speech.
But there have also been positive developments on free speech, particularly where the European Union has brought pressure to bear on new members, and countries aspiring to membership. The most famous example came in October when the EU harshly condemned the prosecution of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk for ‘denigrating Turkishness’: describing the genocide of Armenians during the Great War. Entry into the EU also encouraged free speech in Bulgaria, where Georgi Koritarov, a respected journalist, admitted to acting as a spy during Bulgaria’s communist era and apologised for his actions on TV. His name had been officially released by the Interior Minister as part of a Freedom of Information action. FOIA has become big news in Bulgaria, where the Ministry of Agriculture and Forests was given a sardonic Golden Padlock award for refusing information requests about corrupt sales of seacoast property to private individuals – including a growing number of UK citizens who are buying holiday property on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast. Romania is facing similar challenges in joining the EU, and has set up an ‘Institution for the Investigation into the Crimes of Communism’.
The struggle against discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation has oscillated this year. Much is made in the Western media of the alleged chauvinism of Islam but, on the other side of that coin, in May the first fifty women were appointed as state religious preachers in Morocco in a government drive to promote a more tolerant version of Islam. Four months earlier, in the Sudan two women judges were elected to the new African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. Supreme Court debates whether to roll back the constitutional right to abortion, the trend towards criminalizing all abortions in Central America continues, with the Nicaraguan government passing restrictive legislation in October. The new law penalises abortion even when it is carried out to save the pregnant woman’s life, or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Gay rights suffered a similar setback in Uganda, where a sodomy conviction carries a penalty of life imprisonment. In September a local tabloid began to publish the names of alleged homosexuals is a development that could provoke the government to crack down.
Sadly, the focus of human rights to date has by necessity been upon the prevention of oppression. Yet we must not forget the words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence champions “the the pursuit of happiness.” While the majority in Britain probably could not identify Bhutan on a map, the Himalayan country has made its priority the nation’s ‘Gross National Happiness’, rather than the conventional ‘Gross National Product’.
In 2007, politicians, the media and advocates alike would do well to remember that human happiness is the most significant right of all, a view recognized in Bhutan, if not Britain.
Clive Stafford Smith is the legal director of Reprieve, a UK charity fighting for the lives of people facing the death penalty and other human rights violations. He writes this column monthly. Contact Reprieve at PO Box 52742, London EC4P 4WS. Tel: 020 7353 4640. www.reprieve.org.uk.
This article also appeared in the New Statesman.
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