Global IssuesDespite Western Boycott, Racism Meet Gets Overwhelming Support
A 'boycott' by more than a dozen Western nations, including the United States, Germany, Canada and Israel, failed to derail a high-level meeting on racism and xenophobia hosted by the 193-member General Assembly.
An overwhelming majority of member states, virtually all of them from the developing world, participated in Thursday's meeting aimed at commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA) adopted at the 2001 world conference on racism in the South African port city of Durban.
The landmark declaration, which identified discrimination of all political stripes, including against ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, women, refugees, migrants, Africans and Afro-Americans, has been described as the most comprehensive framework for fighting racism and racial discrimination worldwide.
In her opening address, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay 'saluted' the vast majority of member states who are showing their support for this important achievement intended to combat racism and make a difference in the lives of so many victims worldwide.
'The lead-up to this commemoration has been undoubtedly challenging, in no small part because the issues are complex and sensitive,' she said.
No country, she declared, can claim to be free of racism 'but we must be resolute in finding the courage to unite and move ahead together'.
But that unity was absent at the meeting as some of the Western nations, including Italy, France, Australia, and the Netherlands, were either absent or refused to actively participate primarily because they remained critical of the DDPA.
Despite a mostly Western boycott, however, there were several European countries, including Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, which took part in roundtable discussions on the sidelines of the high-level meeting.
The longstanding criticism of the DDPA is based primarily on its recognition of the 'plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation' and their legitimate right to 'an independent state'.
As a result, the DDPA has been dubbed as being 'anti-Israel' despite the fact the declaration also explicitly recognised 'the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel'.
In a statement released Thursday, the U.S. State Department said it refused to participate in the high-level meeting because the Durban process, since its inception, has included 'ugly displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism'.
In 2009, after working 'to try to achieve a positive, constructive outcome' in the Durban Review Conference (in Geneva), the United States withdrew from participating.
And the outcome document of the review conference 'reaffirmed', in its entirety, the 2001 DDPA, 'which unfairly and unacceptably singled out Israel', the statement said.
Jose Luis Diaz, Amnesty International's representative at the United Nations, told IPS: 'I think it's regrettable that countries are boycotting a process that, although far from perfect, has garnered such support and buy-in from states but also, just as importantly, from the people suffering from racism.'
If they feel the process is flawed, he argued, the best way to fix it is to participate.
'And not participating does not absolve them from the commitments they undertook when most of them accepted the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (only the U.S. and Israel failed to endorse it at Durban),' he said.
Thursday's meeting also adopted, by consensus, a political declaration 'reaffirming' once again the DDPA and the outcome document of the review conference in Geneva as 'a solid foundation for combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.'
Asked whether the boycott affected Thursday's political declaration, Diaz said that some of the countries boycotting participated in the negotiations on the document, but if they had all been fully engaged, 'We might have seen a stronger statement on behalf of victims and in favour of concrete action.'
Jan Lonn, secretary of the World Against Racism Network, told IPS the meeting was 'a great success with the adoption of the outcome document which shows how isolated in reality the anti-Durban campaign is among U.N. member states.'
'This also clearly came out of the roundtable discussions with countries from all regions contributing constructively to the discussion,' he added.
Chandra Bhatnagar, senior staff attorney with the Human Rights Programme at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said 'the absence of the United States in today's proceedings is disappointing.'
'It contradicts the administration's stated position to push for positive models to advance human rights, and sends the wrong message to the global community regarding the U.S. commitment to fight racial injustice everywhere,' he said.
As a founding member of the United Nations and a state party to the most comprehensive anti-discrimination legal instrument in the world - the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) - the United States is legally bound to fight racism and take effective measures to review governmental, national and local policies, and to amend, rescind or nullify any laws and regulations which have the effect of creating or perpetuating racial discrimination wherever it exists, Bhatnagar declared.
Pillay said although there has been limited progress in implementing the Durban declaration on eliminating racism over the last 10 years, 'so far we have done too little, too slowly'.
'We have allowed the global response to racism to be clouded by politics. We must do better. The victims of racism demand and expect this of us,' she declared.
Diaz of Amnesty International told IPS there has been progress since the Durban conference, even if it is difficult in many instances to pin it specifically to that meeting.
'One of the greatest legacies of the conference is how it not only provided an unprecedented forum for people suffering different kinds of discrimination and intolerance around the world to claim their rights, but how it also re-invigorated or even sparked whole movements,' he said.
'For us, it is obvious that there hasn't been sufficient political will to implement the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. Countries seem more ready to use the Durban process as a way of scoring political points against adversaries,' he noted.
The controversy around participation by some countries in discussions of Durban, a process overwhelmingly endorsed by the international community, has only made it more difficult to make the commitments to respond to racism and racial discrimination real, he added.
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service