HUMAN RIGHTS: Mary Robinson to Mediate Between North and South

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Sep 18 1997 (IPS) - The new U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, announced Thursday that she would seek points in common in order to narrow the gap between countries of the North and South in the question of human rights.

Robinson, who assumed her post in Geneva this week, said there is “what has been called a different perception of human rights” between the North and South.

That gap widens to the extent that the perception of human rights narrows, commented the U.N. official, who up to last week was president of the Republic of Ireland.

“If human rights simply mean political rights, then the gap is very wide,” she added.

Aiming to overcome those differences, Robinson held meetings this week with diplomats from all regional groups accredited with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva. She also met with specialised non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Robinson acknowledged the difficulties facing the UNHCHR arising from internal divisions in the bureaucratic structure of the world body and differences with several governments accused of serious rights violations.

She said the dispute between the UNHCHR and the U.N. Human Rights Centre, also based in Geneva, had been resolved with the closing of the Centre and the relocation of its senior staff to other U.N. functions.

Robinson held a meeting Monday with the UNHCHR staff in order to reaffirm that they are a team, and to put an end to “problems of bipolarity.”

The most critical UNHCHR issue, the investigation of reports of massacres in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC – formerly Zaire) is in the hands of a special group advising U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York.

The government of the DRC has blocked various attempts by U.N. human rights bodies to investigate the genocide allegedly perpetrated over the past year in the eastern region of the African country, where some 200,000 Rwandese refugees of the Hutu ethnic group were killed.

The last investigative team sent by the United Nations to Kinshasa a month ago has not yet received authorisation by the government of Kabila to visit the areas where the massacres were reported.

That team was an effort by the United Nations and the secretary general to check impunity in the area of human rights, said Robinson, which she added has tragically become a common phenomenon.

The functionary apologised for failing to provide more complete information on the investigation in the DRC, but added that Annan and his colleagues from New York were monitoring the situation in close contact with the UNHCHR.

The High Commissioner said at her first press conference that she was prepared to maintain her independence and become, if necessary, a moral spokesperson for the victims of torture and other rights violations.

Robinson replaced the first High Commissioner, Jose Ayala Lassa from Ecuador, who was named in April 1994 and resigned last March, under the criticism of specialised NGOs, to occupy the post of Foreign Minister in his country.