Asia-Pacific, Headlines, Human Rights

RIGHTS-NEPAL: Commission’s Autonomy Questioned

Akhilesh Upadhyay

KATHMANDU, Jun 3 2005 (IPS) - Nepal’s human rights groups and political parties are questioning the legitimacy of the newly formed national human rights body, calling it a lapdog institution appointed by the royal government to subvert the human rights regime.

On May 27, a three-member committee appointed five members – four of them new – to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) for a fresh five-year tenure, ignoring pleas from local human rights workers and the international community to renew the term of the sitting members.

In the absence of a representative parliament, which remains dissolved since 2002, activists had urged the government led by King Gyanendra to maintain the status quo.

Previously, members of the commission were appointed by a three-member committee comprising the speaker of the lower house of parliament, the chief justice and the leader of the opposition in parliament. But the government amended the National Human Rights Act in May, clearing the way for a new recommendation committee made up of the speaker of parliament (who continues to hold office even after his term expired last year), the chief justice and the foreign minister.

All three committee members, say rights workers, are compliant to the king, who sacked Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba in February, seized absolute powers, and formed a government under his own leadership.

“We understand that this amendment and formation of the (recommendation) body demonstrates the regime’s continued attempts to dismantle democratic institutions in the country,” said three major human rights groups in a public statement.

The formation of the new commission via an illegitimate amendment violates the basic norms of the rule of law, the groups say.

They base that argument on the Paris Principles, a set of international rules according to which the appointment of a national rights commission by a non-representative body violates the autonomy, independence and impartiality integral to the commission’s functioning.

“The new NHRC members are people handpicked by the king,” says Gopal Siwakoti, one of the three signatories to the statement. “Is it too hard to decide where their loyalty will lie?”

Siwakoti, who heads the human rights group INHURED, believes that appointing commission members without due process puts the royal regime in direct confrontation with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

“There is absence of public inclusion in the selection process,” says Ian Martin, who heads the newly formed OHCHR office in Kathmandu. “We had strongly urged for the continuity of the NHRC,” he added in an interview.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour appointed Martin, a former head of Amnesty International, in April to head the new operation in Nepal.This followed the much-publicised agreement between the OHCHR and Nepal to permit monitors in the country to help establish accountability for a growing number of human rights abuses and to prevent further violations.

More than 11,000 people have died in Nepal after Maoists launched a war against the government more than nine years ago. Both the rebels and security forces have been widely condemned for violating human rights at will.

Late in April the government lifted a state of emergency in the country, but widespread arrests and media censorship continue.

In a letter sent to OHCHR headquarters in Geneva on Thursday, the three Nepalese human rights groups claimed that the main criteria for selection of the NHRC members was their political stance in favour of the military-backed royal takeover on Feb. 1, rather than their competence and independence as human rights experts.

“It is also worrying that the newly formed NHRC might be politically used to cover up or justify human rights violations committed by the royal regime instead of protecting human rights victims and defenders,” it said.

Local rights groups fear that a compromised national rights commission will lead to serious distortions in Nepal’s rights discourse at a time when the number of rights violations in the Himalayan kingdom are among the worst in the world.

Yet others say that much as it may try, the NHRC alone cannot decide the human rights discourse in Nepal, and any attempt to mislead public opinion will quickly lead to its own downfall.

The presence of an OHCHR office in Kathmandu means that NHRC members will be constantly under the watchful eyes of the international community, says Jogendra Ghimire, former secretary of the NHRC. He dismisses claims that all its new members are “lapdog” appointees, stressing that “a certain level of cooperation between the government and NHRC is helpful, indeed desirable.”

“Often, the human rights regime works best in countries where there is least noise and a lot of quiet work,” Ghimire added in an interview. “Conversely, the experience in many countries with serious human rights violations shows that the government turns a deaf ear when national human rights commissions become overly confrontational, noisy, and resort to public grandstanding.”

The new NHRC members say it would be wiser to pass judgment on them after at least a 100-day “honeymoon period” rather than dismissing them as “royalists” now.

“Let my history tell the story,” Sudip Pathak, the only member in the newly formed NHRC with a background as a human rights worker, told IPS. “I have already said publicly – and I want to reiterate – I will quit if I fail to uphold the lofty ideals of human rights protection in Nepal.”