By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Feb 5 1999 (IPS)

Violations of the rights of parliamentarians are on the rise, despite a simultaneous political opening, said members of the human rights committee of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). The abuses, however, are becoming more subtle.

The committee announced that it was currently studying the cases of 311 legislators from 31 countries, whose rights had been violated.

Abuses have been seen in one out of every five parliaments in the world – the highest proportion since the committee began its work 20 years ago, according to IPU secretary-general Anders Johnsson.

One of the reasons underlying the higher number of violations is the expansion of multi-party politics worldwide. In the past, there were less reports of abuses, because single-party parliaments with no opposition predominated, said Johnsson.

The most frequent crimes against legislators reported in the past were murders, disappearances, extrajudicial executions or imprisonment.

But today an upsurge of government repression of freedom of speech is being observed, said the IPU committee’s deputy chair, Hilarion Etong.

A number of countries have enacted laws that allow legislators to be arrested and subjected to stiff sentences on the basis of statements made while in office – the latest trend to emerge from the most recent cases studied by the committee, according to Etong.

Johnsson lamented the fact that even when political parties alternate in power, abuses are frequently observed. The new parties on the scene simply do the same thing, he said.

In some circumstances, economic questions lie behind violations of the rights of parliamentarians. In November, the IPU human rights committee sent a mission to Chad to study the situation of legislator Ngarlejy Yorongar, sentenced to three years in prison for supposedly defamatory statements about President Idriss Deby.

Yorongar had criticised the awarding of an oil concession to a consortium comprised of France’s Elf, the Dutch-Anglo Shell and the U.S. Esso transnational corporations. He had previously denounced that Elf financed Deby’s 1996 electoral campaign.

The IPU mission to Chad was allowed to interview the detainee, said Etong.

But a delegation sent by the IPU human rights committee to Malaysia was unable to meet in “acceptable conditions” with Lim Guan Eng, a member of the Chamber of Representatives, who is serving an 18-month sentence. The committee’s envoys were also unable to make “acceptable” contacts with authorities, and received contradictory versions on Lim’s state of health.

In both cases, the committee demanded that the lawmakers be released.

The IPU committee is also studying the situation of elected legislators in Argentina who were kept from taking their seats in Congress.

The committee has asked the president of the Senate to provide reports on the senator representing the province of Catamarca, Ramon Eduardo Saadi, said committee member Juan Pablo Letelier.

Letelier said he had also received a similar complaint from senators elected in the Argentine province of Chaco, but that the cases were currently being studied under the IPU’s strict norms of confidentiality.

IPU president Miguel Angel Martinez told IPS that he had read the reports on the complaints filed by the senators from the province of Chaco “with some perplexity…I was surprised, because we have a very favourable opinion about the functioning of Argentina’s democracy,” he said.

The report on the irregular situation in Argentina’s Senate will be dealt with in a confidential manner until the next meeting of the IPU council next April, said Martinez.

The IPU, created in 1889, counts 139 of the world’s 179 parliaments among its members.

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