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Peter Kellner
Chairman of the Royal Commonwealth Society.
Commonwealth conferences used to matter. Their decisions helped to
end apartheid in South Africa and white rule in Zimbabwe. Their debates,
especially during the Thatcher era, made big news.
No longer. Apart from insiders and a
few obsessives, who knows or cares what Commonwealth leaders decided two
years ago in Trinidad, or what they will discuss this week in
Australia? The institution is sleepwalking toward irrelevance. As
chairman of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS), a charity devoted to
the promotion of Commonwealth links and values, I fear for the future.
The Commonwealth could become one of the world’s great 21st century
networks. It won’t unless the presidents and prime ministers who gather
Friday in Perth insist on big changes.
Fortunately, they will have a route
map in front of them. Two years ago, prompted by damning research
commissioned by the RCS, they appointed an Eminent Persons Group to plan
reform. It has done its work, defied many skeptics and recommended
radical reform. In particular, it wants the Commonwealth to take a far
more active stand on human rights.
It records “a growing perception that
the Commonwealth has become indifferent because it fails to stand up
for the values that it has declared as fundamental to its existence.” In
a thinly veiled attack on the Commonwealth secretariat — its civil
service — the group warns against “complacency and inertia,” an attitude
that already “poses the most serious threat to the continued relevance
and vitality of the Commonwealth itself.”
So what should the Commonwealth’s
leaders decide? Here are three things that would kick-start revival.
First, they should adopt the group’s recommendation to appoint an
independent human rights commissioner, tasked with monitoring violations
in member states and demanding action when violations occur. At
present, the Commonwealth acts against only the most egregious
offenders, such as Zimbabwe and Fiji. No action has been taken against,
for example, Uganda or Malawi for outlawing homosexuality, or for
failing to prevent the persecution of lesbian and gay people.
Second, Commonwealth leaders should
reject the canard that human rights are a white, western idea that rich
liberals foist on poor countries with different values. Earlier this
year, when the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution attacking
violations of human rights on grounds of sexuality, its main sponsor was
not Britain or Canada or Australia, but South Africa.
Or consider what happened two years
ago in India when New Delhi’s High Court deemed as unconstitutional a
19th century law banning homosexuality. Far from bowing before historic
western values, the court explicitly rejected one repressive feature of
India’s colonial inheritance. The point is not just that basic human
rights are universal in principle, but that they are being asserted with
increasing confidence in poor societies as well as rich ones. The
Commonwealth secretariat should be leading the charge for all human
rights to be respected in all 54 member states. Instead it has so far
kept off the battlefield.
Now it is possible that the
secretariat will seek to fudge the issue in Perth by supporting the
proposal for a human rights commissioner, but then controlling their
appointment, terms of reference and resources in such a way that they
prove impotent. Commonwealth leaders must prevent that happening.
How they rise to their third
challenge will tell us whether they really mean business. After Perth,
the next Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting is due to take place
in 2013 in Sri Lanka. Although the country’s civil war is now over, and
some emergency regulations have been scrapped, controversies over its
human rights record remain.
In the past few weeks, both Human
Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists have complained
that people can still be detained for up to 18 months without charge
under a 1979 law that has not been repealed. Amnesty International has
also stepped in, calling for Sri Lanka’s government to release
“thousands of people” held in detention. Moreover, there is the
unfinished business from the civil war: a UN expert panel concluded
earlier this year that it had found “credible allegations” of war crimes
by all sides.
One option is for the leaders of the
Commonwealth to choose another venue for 2013 — probably Mauritius,
which has won well-deserved accolades for the quality of its governance.
Another option is to insist that Sri Lanka scrap detention without
trial, prosecute the war criminals in its ranks and prove its commitment
to human rights.
The significance of the decision is
hard to overstate. The Commonwealth’s ability to become a respected 21st
century global network rests on its commitment to democracy and human
rights. For this week’s meeting to confirm Sri Lanka unconditionally as
hosts in two years’ time would be to confirm the worst fears that the
Commonwealth has utterly lost its way.
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