RIGHTS: Afghanistan Setting Up Human Rights Commission

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May 28 2002 (IPS) - Afghanistan has decided to set up its first independent National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to probe past and present abuses in the war-ravaged country.

U.N. spokesperson David Singh told reporters here Tuesday the Afghan Interim Administration took the decision to create the commission in Kabul Monday in conjunction with the United Nations and a group of some 50 Afghan human rights activists.

The Commission is to be established in the first week of June and begin its work for an initial period of two years beginning in July.

Singh said the NHRC is in follow-up to the overall political agreement reached in Bonn last year, under which the interim government was set up under its current leader, Hamid Karzai.

The Bonn agreement, reached following a meeting of Afghan leaders and Western donors in the German city, included provisions to safeguard human rights.

Sam Zia-Zarisi of Human Rights Watch (HRW) told IPS his organisation was strongly in favour of the NHRC but added it remains to be seen how much international support the nascent body will garner.

He said the first order of business is to deal with ongoing human rights problems, specifically attacks on ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has had a long history of human rights violations by successive governments over the last two decades.

The rigid, Islamist Taliban government, which was ousted last October, was not only accused of human rights abuses including shutting out women from public life.

The largest number of human rights abuses in Afghanistan was directed at women and girls whose access to education, health care facilities and employment was severely restricted by the Taliban regime, rights advocates have said.

In a report entitled “Discrimination against Women and Girls in Afghanistan”, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan catalogued a long list of human rights abuses over a 23-year period that covered several civil wars and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The study, released in January, said the overall state of women’s mental health was poor, with more than 70 percent of women exposed to Taliban policies meeting the criteria for major depression.

Singh said the NHRC has framed a programme including 18 months of consultations around the country to find out how abuses of the past could be addressed.

Among the programme’s other elements is a Karzai proposal for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has strong support from the United Nations.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson said such a commission is important for families of those who have suffered rights violations. She described the body’s contribution as the beginning of respect for the dignity of the individual.

Robinson said there might be initial difficulties because international human rights activists have charged that there are people in power in Kabul now who also have records of past violations.

Robinson’s office has earmarked about 50,000 dollars as seed money for the proposed truth commission. She said she is confident that donor nations will come up with the necessary funds to make the proposal a reality.

Singh said the NHRC, on the other hand, will be entirely financed by donors. It will also have regional satellite offices in all the major centres of the country, including Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad, Bamyan and Gardez.

Asked if present leaders would also be subject to prosecution if found guilty of abuses, Singh said there is no provision in the Bonn agreement to provide immunity from future prosecution.

The agreement explicitly holds the Interim Administration and all subsequent political bodies to international human rights norms and standards.

“The decision on who will be held accountable, and in what way, will be what comes out of this national consultation process to take place over the course of the next year and a half,” he said.

“There is no amnesty and there is no immunity for perpetrators of gross violations of human rights, war crimes or crimes against humanity,” Singh added.

Zia-Zarisi said HRW is strongly opposed to any immunity for any Afghan leader, past or present. NHRC, he said, should not only investigate abuses but also hold accountable those found guilty.

Among the functions of the NHRC will be to investigate and monitor human rights abuses; deal with individual complaints and petitions; establish a national programme of human rights education; oversee human rights institution building in the official and non-governmental sectors; create a national programme for human rights of women; and facilitate broad national consultation on transitional justice and how to deal with abuses of the past.