RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Civil Society Takes the Initiative

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 7 2000 (IPS) - Some 2,000 organisations of civil society drew up an “alternative report” assessing Brazil’s compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to fill the vacuum left by the government.

Within two years after ratifying the covenant, signatory states were to draft reports on the targets set and assess compliance with the commitments assumed in terms of enforcing respect for economic, social and cultural rights.

But given the government’s failure to do so eight years after Brazil ratified the treaty in 1992, civil society has taken the initiative, and a delegation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other institutions submitted its own follow-up report to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Geneva.

Romeu Olmar Klich, secretary of the National Human Rights Movement, an umbrella linking more than 300 Brazilian NGOs, said the chair of the UN committee, Virginia Bonoan-Dandan, had pledged to accept the “alternative report” as the official document if the government had not submitted its own by the committee’s next session in September.

“This was a participatory process, in which around 2,000 organisations discussed the report in 18 public hearings throughout the country,” said Klich, a Presbyterian minister.

He added that society had got the jump on the government, unprecedented in the UN committee, which saw the decision by Brazil’s NGOs as an example to be followed by civil society in other countries that have failed to live up to the commitments assumed in the ICESCR.

NGOs usually set forth their position in a “counter-report” that criticises or corroborates the official document submitted to the UN committee. But this year civil society in Brazil decided on a novel route.

Parliamentary deputy Nilmario Miranda, who up to last year presided over the Human Rights Commission of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, and who participated in the civil society delegation that visited Geneva last week, said he believed the government would submit a report this year given the growing domestic and international pressure.

Brazil has a notorious human rights record, blemished by frequent complaints of police brutality and periodic massacres of landless and indigenous activists and prisoners. It is also one of the countries with the most unequal distribution of income in Latin America, the region with the greatest gap between rich and poor.

The document drawn up by the NGOs, with the participation of lawmakers and public prosectors – “members of the state, but who are independent and answer to society,” Klich pointed out – lists violations of economic, social and cultural rights in Brazil.

The “alternative report” mentions the extreme poverty and hunger suffered by at least 26 million in a total population of over 161 million; the dangerous or otherwise inappropriate work to which 2.5 million children are subjected; and the disadvantages of Blacks and women in terms of income, wages, educational levels and power.

It points out, for example, that women account for just six percent of the members of the national Congress, 10 percent of the members of state legislatures, only one of the country’s 27 state governors, and just 302 of a total of 5,506 mayors.

The government budget for assistance to indigenous communities shrank by more than 50 percent from 1995 to 1998, the document adds.

It also maintains that the land expropriated for redistribution to landless rural workers and the funds invested to help them settle on their new farms are insufficient, and that more needs to be done to resolve the problem of the heavy concentration of land in relatively few hands.

At the fourth National Human Rights Conference, held in May 1999, the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso announced that it would expand its human rights programme to encompass economic and social rights, but no concrete steps have been taken, said Deputy Miranda.

Social inequity has compounded the neglect of those rights by the government, he added.

The problem, said Miranda, was based on the division of human rights into civil and political rights on one hand and economic, social and cultural rights on the other, which occurred when the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the ICESCR were adopted by the UN in 1966. That division was a result of the Cold War, the lawmaker said.

But today those rights are increasingly recognised as “indissoluble and universal,” especially since the World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993, he added.

The movement demanding that the various categories of human rights be considered inseparable should give rise to instruments similar to the International Criminal Court that will try violations of civil and political rights, which is in the process of creation.

In the future, said Miranda, a prominent figure in Brazil’s human rights movement, there will also be courts to try violations of economic, social and cultural rights, and institutions like the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will have to take such rights into account.

The movement advocating respect for those rights is “powerful and unassailable,” because it is based on ethics, does not respond to special interests, and defends principles which are enshrined in the constitutions of most countries, like that of Brazil, he maintained.