Statement by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay at the Meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Human Rights Group, House of Commons, London, 6 November 2013

 House of Commons, London

6 November 2013

I am delighted to be with the members of the All-Party Parliamentary Human Right Group, and to sit alongside your chair Ann Clwyd (pron. ‘Clew-WID’), a voice for human rights that for years now has rung loud and clear. Thank you for your invitation. I look forward to your questions and comments after my statement.

 Ladies and gentlemen, I have been asked to illustrate the importance to national policy and diplomacy of human rights, point out recent progress in their promotion and protection, and demonstrate how the international human rights mechanisms serve social peace in all countries, including the United Kingdom. My brief is also to outline some of the work that my Office does in “operationalizing” human rights and assisting countries meet their obligations and respond to crises, all in 20 minutes.

What to say of human rights today? Some will dwell on the ruin that has befallen Syria. Others will look more hopefully to the street, where people on all continents, increasingly aware of their rights and emboldened, are out demanding accountability from State authorities.

Both views are aspects of something larger. A proper perspective on the workings of international human rights today must take full measure of the implications, the binding nature of a State’s treaty signature and ratification, given the prevalence and impact of modern communications and social media in all parts of the world.

A proper view must be sensitive to a growing risk of setbacks, the vulnerability, as well as the unprecedented boldness, of civil society movements in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe.

A broader picture must show the hard lessons learned by the United Nations in matters of protection, and the looming pre-eminence of human rights in all the UN’s future work. And it must accommodate the dawning realization, one shared and acted on by the Government of this country, that human rights belong at the heart of both the policy and goals of sustainable development post-2015.

OHCHR’s job

The job of the OHCHR, with budget requirements of 208 million US dollars this year and around 1,200 staff, is to provide the paid hands, know-how, working premises, secretarial and logistical services to support and serve the international human rights mechanism and also directly to assist States in their efforts to implement the human rights standards.

We do this through our 59 field presences worldwide, and through partnerships with UN and non-UN international and regional entities in a growing number of countries.
 
The system is in two parts: the foundation is formed by the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various treaties. Set upon the foundation are the working parts of the machinery, the Human Rights Council, Special Procedures, Treaty Bodies and the Universal Periodic Review. Their purpose is to ensure that the international norms and standards are translated into consistent law and practice in individual countries.

The Human Rights Council, created in 2006 and convening no less than three times a year, is an inter-governmental body composed of representatives of 47 countries elected by the United Nations General Assembly to three-year terms. The Council appoints thematic or country-specific Special Procedures mandate-holders who undertake country missions, send communications to States and conduct studies.

The Treaty Bodies interpret, review and monitor implementation of the human rights treaties by each State party.

The Universal Periodic Review is half-way through its second cycle of country-by-country peer review of the human rights promises and records of all 193 UN Member States. One of the tasks of my Office is to ensure that this system is sustainable.

The members of Treaty Body committees and the Special Procedures are independent experts from many backgrounds, cultures and countries, elected by Member States. Some of these experts come from this country.

My Office is the Secretariat for the Special Procedures mandate holders and the Treaty Bodies. These mechanisms have unprecedented momentum today, yielding positive impact on the ground.

‘Intrusion’ and impact

More and more governments are taking steps towards ratification and full compliance with treaty provisions, whether by adopting harsher penalties in Costa Rica for human trafficking or repealing the death penalty in the Philippines. There is evidence that the obligatory reviewing, public information and reporting by States to the various Treaty Bodies serve a preventive, early-warning purpose.

Although some may call the system intrusive, the UN human rights mechanism have become direct channels to the world stage for individual complaints on human right violations, through public hearings at local or international level, particularly when access to remedies has become exhausted locally or is non-existent.  These bodies produce significant jurisprudence and an open record of legal analysis, discussion and recommendations, and together are a growing provider of legal training and guidance to Government and state institutions in many countries.

The human rights mechanisms speak truth to power, but also look to the protection of rights-holders on the ground. On the one hand, they remind Governments and State institutions of their obligations under international human rights treaties which they have solemnly ratified, and propose, often successfully, cooperation with them towards improvement in real life. On the other hand, they provide the means for open dialogue with civil society and individual human rights defenders.

The implementation by countries of human rights standards is therefore not only a legal obligation, it is also a technical challenge. That is why my Office also works at the country and regional levels, at the request or with the consent of host countries, to strengthen national human rights promotion and protection systems, in collaboration with local stakeholders and international partners.

This technical work is based on international standards and the recommendations of the UN treaty bodies.  It ranges from providing training to the judiciary, the police and prison personnel on applying human rights standards in their every-day work, to providing expert advice to Parliament on compliance of draft legislation with human rights standards. It encompasses advising relevant line ministries on how to ensure that national development plans and the provision of education, health, water and sanitation and adequate housing includes and respects the rights of all. The work seeks to ensure that all this is done without discrimination, and with due regard to the vulnerabilities faced by specific groups.

Growing demand for HR-based approach

Ladies and gentlemen,
I am a lawyer and a judge by training, but now in the sixth year of my current job, I would venture that foreign policy has no foundation if its vision is narrow and a human rights-based approach is lacking. Why was the “Arab Spring” a surprise to so many? The problem was their blindness in one eye.

Two years ago, Tunisia showed up the limitations of conventional thinking on development. Economic growth, tourists and surface calm hid popular anger and despair at unresponsive, venal governance. Despite promising figures for GNP and foreign investment, its people were being ignored, humiliated, left behind.  I cannot say that countries automatically fall apart when human rights are repressed or neglected, but countries that fall apart are very often the ones where most human rights are missing.

With international discussion of a human rights-based approach now well underway, the system my Office serves is increasingly being driven by demand. Urgent requests for on-site assistance are surging, requiring direct, face-to-face encounters in countries in turmoil, stalemate, renewal or transition.

This year, in addition to supporting the Commissions of Inquiry into the situations in Syria and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, my Office also sent rapid deployment teams to the Central African Republic, Guinea Conakry, Kenya, Mali and Myanmar to respond to crises and monitor and investigate specific human rights situations.

The old order in the Middle East and North Africa is slowly disintegrating, but the transition is still uncertain in Yemen, Egypt and Libya, among other countries, and the nature and pace of change are different in each, and moving in different ways, at very different speeds.

Progress is perhaps most pronounced in Tunisia, where OHCHR has a now well-established office, and where a national dialogue is under way involving all key elements of society.  This year we inaugurated the latest of our country offices, an action-oriented team in Yemen, at the government’s express invitation.

The Egyptian government and my Office are entering the final phase of negotiations for the OHCHR Regional Office for North Africa. I welcome the confirmation of the Interim Government to establish this presence which will provide the required assistance and support to all stakeholders and duty bearers in this difficult period.

In 2014, we also hope to successfully conclude serious talks with the Government of Myanmar about a Country Office, which, after the one in Phnom Penh, would become only our second country office in Asia.

One of our longest-serving country offices, in Colombia, has just had its host-country mandate renewed for one year, taking into account Colombia’s forthcoming presidential elections.  Renewal was a sensitive process.  The Colombia office, like all Country Offices, is an honest partner in national and local efforts to promote rights, but also an influential source of public statements highlighting violations, breaches of international human rights law and humanitarian law, as well as adverse public policies in that country. The Colombia office will be even more needed if the Government and the FARC arrive at a peace deal that demands human rights monitoring.

And our field presence does not just consist of country offices it also includes so-called human rights components in  UN peace missions.  The peacekeeping force that was deployed to Mali this year is a recent example. OHCHR also has 12 Regional Offices and, in addition, UN Country teams can now count on designated human rights advisers in almost 20 countries. There are standing invitations from Governments in Europe, East Asia and Africa to teachers, trainers and legal advisers from the international human rights mechanism.  Authorities in disputed territories seek our mediation. Illustrious schools of law and the legal profession in many countries seek our support. If only we had the means to satisfy it all.

OHCHR performance and funding

Global demand for UN services to human rights is dangerously outstripping the supply. This is a problem I have for some time now been calling critical.

 If human rights are to lead development, not lag it, in the post-2015 agenda, OHCHR’s 59 field presences around the world pale in comparison to the 174 for development.  The OHCHR, the sole administrator of the human rights system, receives just under 3 per cent of the total United Nations regular budget. The number of new mandates created by the General Assembly and Human Rights Council continues to increase our workload, year by year, without an equivalent increase in funding. Our budget from voluntary contributions, on which about 60 per cent of our work depends, stopped rising in 2009.
 
We are aware of the straitened times and are assuming our responsibilities. We are tightening systems, procedures and our management structure, and doing more with less. We have cut our budget by 12 per cent this year, and will end 2013 with a deficit of about USD 15 million financed from reserves. At current operating levels, that debt option will disappear in 2015.

Performance assessments by our long-standing donors are improving. We are developing the vital extra fundraising capacity we need ourselves, reaching out to prospective supporters in new fields and cultivating our ties with existing donors. We are the first ones in the UN to have online telephone contributions. In 2012, the United Kingdom, with 3.9 million pounds (pounds sterling), ranked as our seventh-biggest donor in voluntary contributions. All this has figured in my talks with your Government today.

 Ladies and gentlemen, we have already made useful progress. Twenty years ago, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna produced the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action. This was perhaps the most important human rights instrument of the last half-century, serving as a blue-print for development that the human rights system has largely followed since then.

For a start, there was an operational breakthrough: as a result of Vienna, 1993 also saw creation by the UN General Assembly of the Office of the High Commissioner, its occupant designated as the official with principal responsibility for United Nations human rights activities.
 
Civil society organizations and human-rights-defender movements have blossomed in ways unimaginable 20 years ago.  National Human Rights Institutions, competing for international accreditation, sprang up in more than 100 countries.

The first permanent International Criminal Court, on which I served, assumed operations. Regional tribunals on war crimes tried, sentenced and jailed perpetrators. Vocal new groups, on the ground, demanding the rights of people with disabilities, or of migrant workers and their families, or gays and lesbians, or families of the disappeared, won court decisions and substantial material redress. And the international, normative framework has grown into place, the machinery balanced to deliver human rights at national and international levels.

But all is not well. We have not made human rights universally ensured, or honoured in the ratification, or viewed everywhere as indivisible and interrelated, despite our determination to make them so. States still argue the merits of cultural relativism and exemption. Women, minorities and migrants are still spurned, beaten and abused. The right to development is still not accepted by all. Power still corrupts, and leaders are still prepared to sacrifice their people in order to retain it.

I worry about backlash, about human rights defenders who, as a price of their success, face threats, harassment, violence, murder, restrictive new laws and reprisals – reprisals even for taking part in UN proceedings on UN premises, as has happened during recent sessions of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The world is coming to see that signature of a Convention is no free pass. As some already know from experience, treaty ratification or taking a seat on the Human Rights Council, while still failing to address human rights violations, attracts immediate, uncomfortable, international attention. That is the remorseless nature of media today. No State wishes to be seen to fail in its responsibility to protect, or to honour international contracts.

I grant the exercise is not always comfortable. The United Kingdom knows as well as other countries that acceptance of the obligations and duties under international treaties also demands acceptance of human rights scrutiny from afar, scrutiny that can also be up close and personal, from independent, non-partisan Special Procedures, Treaty Bodies Committees or through the Universal Periodic Review.

It is natural for those unaccustomed to the workings of established human rights mechanisms to feel discomfort when this happens, and natural to question it. It is also understandable when acceptance of scrutiny is met, from some sectors of society, by sharp questioning of its legitimacy.

But it is dangerous to yield to tabloid pressure and turn away from international law and obligations, reject participation in bodies or cultural habits perceived as foreign, or, in a world now irretrievably globalized, seek electoral advantage by reasserting sovereignty in all matters.

Should the UK government feel such pressure, I would call on it to resist. Negative discourse on human rights at the highest level will send the wrong signal at home and especially abroad, where, in so many countries, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is striving, with measurable success, to promote the protection of human rights.

For decades now, your closest strategic interests -- peace and justice in Europe – have been well-served by cross-border, regional and international institutions, conventions and collaborative approaches. As I told the House of Lords this morning, it was the recommendations, carried on for ten years by one of the Treaty Bodies of our system, that ultimately helped Parliament bring caste-based discrimination in this country within the scope of the Equality Act.

This Parliament must remain both receptive to the world and a beacon to human rights defenders everywhere, from your pioneering work on LGBT rights, and all forms of discrimination, to your pressure to ensure accountability for sexual violence in conflict and your holistic, people-centred approach to development.

The United Kingdom has served international peace, cooperation and understanding too long and too well to seek today to pick and choose its way out of its solemn international obligations.

I welcome the United Kingdom’s candidacy for membership in the Human Rights Council in 2014. I would see it as reassurance of this country’s underlying, perennial allegiance, beyond party politics, to justice and to human rights law and its institutions.

Thank you.