The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) says it is “deeply concerned” over the Venezuelan government’s decision to withdraw from the American Convention on Human Rights, a move that went into effect Tuesday.

The Venezuelan government has denounced the four-decade-old convention, which currently covers 23 of the 35 members of the Organisation of American States (OAS), as a tool of U.S. meddling in Latin America. But rights groups warn the move will eliminate a court-of-last-resort option for Venezuelans who feel they are unable to receive a fair judicial response within their own country – an option that remains guaranteed in the Venezuelan constitution.

“This comes at the expense of the protection of rights of the people of Venezuela, who are stripped of a mechanism to protect their human rights,” the IACHR, based here in Washington, stated Tuesday.

“The Inter-American Commission calls on Venezuela to reconsider this decision … [and] regrets that, despite repeated calls by the Commission and by other international bodies for Venezuela to reconsider its decision to denounce the Convention, the State of Venezuela has not reversed that decision.”

The American Convention on Human Rights sets out how OAS countries must guarantee citizens’ human rights. It also empowers the IACHR and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in Costa Rica, to monitor and rule on rights-related complaints that have not been dealt with through domestic judicial channels.

Venezuela is the third country to formally denounce the American Convention on Human Rights and withdraw from the Inter-American Court’s jurisdiction. Trinidad & Tobago made a similar decision in 1998 after the court criticised that country’s use of the death penalty, while Peru tried to do the same the following year.

“It is very unfortunate that the Venezuelan government has decided to go through with this action,” Francisco Quintana, programme director for the Andean, North America and Caribbean region at the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“Yet if the government thought it was going to get away from this international supervision completely, that’s not right – at least with regard to any human rights violations that occurred before Sep. 10.”

Indeed, given that Venezuela remains a member of the OAS, the IACHR will maintain jurisdiction to monitor the country’s human rights situation. Further, as Quintana notes, the Inter-American Court will be able to continue hearing cases of alleged rights violations from during the period that Venezuela was party to the convention, from 1977 until Tuesday.

Yet critics worry about the potential impact not only on Venezuelans who have suffered abuses but also on the strength of the overall Inter-American structure, one of the world’s oldest pan-regional rights systems. The United Nations warned Tuesday the move could “have a very negative impact on human rights in [Venezuela] and beyond”.

‘Grave backlash’

Tuesday’s withdrawal follows through on one of the last policy decisions made by former president Hugo Chavez, who in July 2012 stepped up complaints that the Inter-American Court was interfering in domestic affairs.

Chavez had earlier accused the OAS of supporting a coup against his government. But the final motivation to withdraw appears to have been a ruling by the Inter-American Court in favour of Raul Diaz Pena, a Venezuelan who was found to have been mistreated in prison after being convicted of placing bombs near Caracas embassies.

“The Venezuelan government was against the external supervision of human rights issues from an international organ – over the past decade, the Inter-American Court lodged many cases against Venezuela, and the Chavez administration began to view these as political attacks,” CEJIL’s Quintana says.

“While the court established that there were clear violations of human rights, many didn’t even take place under Chavez. Some had to do with judicial independence, others with excessive force by the police – a wide range of cases, which offered no reason for the government to become frustrated with the system as a whole. After all, these rights were explicitly protected by the system and the convention.”

On Monday, CEJIL and more than 50 other organisations from 14 countries throughout the region derided the Venezuelan move and lamented its broader implications.

“Venezuela’s denunciation of the American Convention represents a grave backlash for the protection of human rights in the region,” the groups warned. “Additionally, this denunciation is preceded in recent years by the non-compliance of most of the sentences and measures of protection issued by the Inter-American Court.”

Also on Monday, Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, reiterated Chavez’s charge that the Inter-American system was a U.S. pawn.

“[T]he U.S. is not part of the human rights system, does not acknowledge the court’s jurisdiction or the commission, but … the commission headquarters is in Washington,” President Maduro said at a news conference, according to media reports. “Almost all participants and bureaucracy that are part of the IACHR are captured by the interests of the State Department of the United States.”

Indeed, the United States, itself a member of the OAS, has signed but never ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, part of a longstanding suspicion of international legal instruments. Yet rights groups are suggesting that Maduro’s criticism underlines an incongruous policy stance.

“The Venezuelan government’s attitude is highly contradictory,” Guadalupe Marengo, deputy director of the Americas programme at Amnesty International, a watchdog group, said Tuesday.

“On the one hand it is promoting universal ratification of the American Convention on Human Rights and urging other countries to ratify this instrument while, on the other, it is withdrawing from it and denying its inhabitants access to the protection of one of its bodies.”

Silence

Decisions by the Inter-American Court have increasingly rankled several Latin American governments. Yet Venezuela, along with Ecuador, Bolivia and others, has led a recent attempt to reform the Inter-American system in ways that activists say would weaken several of the IACHR’s most important tools.

That attempt was rebuffed by member states at the end of a major debate process late last year, though the push for reforms continues.

Still, advocates say there has been no significant response from OAS members to Venezuela’s decision to withdraw from the convention. “There have been no repercussions from other members,” Quintana says.

Another watchdog group, Human Rights Watch, recently sent a series of letters to the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, urging them to persuade Venezuela to rethink its decision. Yet Jose Miguel Vivanco, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas division and lead author of the letters, told IPS there was “No answer – silence. It was very disappointing.”

From left to right, José Miguel Insulza, OAS Secretary General, José de Jesús Orozco, chair of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and Emilio Álvarez Icaza, executive secretary of the IACHR. Credit: Juan Manuel Herrera, OAS/ CC by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 1 2012 (IPS)

Representatives of nearly 40 civil society organisations from throughout the Americas gathered here on Wednesday to express concerns with proposed changes to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The governments of Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, as well as Brazil and Peru, have increasingly been attempting to distance themselves from the diktats of the pan-regional IACHR, which since its creation in 1959 has proven to be one of the most effective parts of the often-derided system of the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) system.

While criticism of the IACHR from those governments culminated in particularly strong rhetoric at the OAS General Assembly in June, Venezuela took a major step when it formally announced in September that it would be leaving the inter-American system.

“It is critical to have a strong institution that fully complies with the promotion and protection of fundamental rights, and which constantly ensures that countries respect these rights. This is now being threatened,” Mauricio Alarcón, with Fundamedios, a Quito-based group focused on freedom of expression, said in Spanish-language testimony at the Washington headquarters OAS.

“There are those who say that violation of rights is a thing of the past. But of course this still exists, and today more than ever we need a strong, active system – one that thinks of victims and is not subject to the state.”

To explain its decision, the Caracas government denounced the American Convention on Human Rights, the legal underpinning for IACHR judicial proceedings, as a relic of U.S. domination. The United States is indeed a part of, and hosts, the IACHR, but it has not ratified the American Convention on Human Rights.

The Venezuela announcement was a serious strike at the vision of a universal rights system covering the Americas. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillai immediately moved to “strongly urge” Caracas to reconsider, warning on Sep. 11 that “a vital layer of human rights protection for Venezuelans – and potentially for other Latin Americans as well – will be stripped away if this decision is carried out.”

Imperfect democracies

The withdrawal also comes as a broader attempt to “reform” the IACHR system is being pushed by Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia and others.

In January, sensing mounting pushback, OAS Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza agreed to endorse proposals for procedural changes within the commission. Critics say these changes would make it more difficult for victims of human rights abuses to access the inter-American system, and more difficult for the IACHR to enforce its own writ.

The commission’s important documentation process would also be hindered by the proposed changes, potentially allowing member countries to hold up publication of critical reports for up to a year and eliminating a section of the IACHR annual report that highlights flagrant rights abuses.

“We are extremely concerned that the reforms process that has been put forward by the OAS political members could end up weakening the Inter-American Commission and its ability to protect human rights in this hemisphere,” Viviana Krsticevic, executive director of the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), a Washington-based organisation that recently mounted an information campaign on the inter-American reforms process, told IPS.

The IACHR “has made very significant contributions in our imperfect democracies, and we are sincerely worried that some of the proposals by the states could be very detrimental for the protection of individual rights and also for the agenda of strengthening our democratic institutions”, Krsticevic added.

So far, the IACHR has refused to follow these non-binding recommendations, leading instead to Wednesday’s hearings, part of a process that is set to stretch into the spring. But if the reforms are not enacted, Bolivia, Ecuador and Bolivia say they will follow Venezuela’s lead.

While many at Wednesday’s testimony said it is critical that the inter-American system remains pan-regional, others suggest the reforms pose a far greater danger.

“Given the commission’s record of achievement, even if more governments go the way of Venezuela, the commission is not at risk of losing its relevance in the countries that continue to participate in the inter-American system,” Lisa Reinsberg, executive director of the International Justice Resource Center (which has a wealth of related information here), told IPS.

“If the proposed reforms are imposed on the commission, however, there is a serious risk of it becoming a diminished, constrained version of itself, less able to meaningfully address the pressing human rights concerns of the day.”

Gutting the commission

The IACHR is made up of seven commissioners. As a supranational body, it is empowered to hear petitions at a court in Costa Rica when national systems are incapable or unwilling to offer justice for alleged human rights violations.

Over the past five and a half decades, the commission’s work has proven instrumental in pushing regional issues related to accountability, military jurisdiction and equality, and in documenting gross abuse.

“Systems for victims of human rights violations are just like hospitals for people who are sick – if you stop the emergency room from functioning, you would be cutting the powers of the system,” Gustavo Gallón Giraldo, with the Colombian Commission of Jurists, said at the OAS Wednesday.

“Proposals by the [OAS] member states … have to be aimed at strengthening the system. Yet this morning we’ve heard of initiatives that would do the opposite – that would weaken the system. This cannot be tolerated.”

The IACHR is expected to continue to discuss reforms-related issues for the next few weeks. According to the deadline set by the OAS General Assembly in June, full and final discussion on the process is expected by March.

And while several observers have suggested that the OAS has indeed broadened the scope of its dialogue with various stakeholders since June, anxieties persist that in-country discussions are taking place neither broadly nor openly.

“Brazilians know very little about the reforms process of such an important institution,” Alexandre de Oliveira Andrade Moraes, with the freedom of expression-focused group Article 19, told the IACHR on Wednesday. “Closed-door talks with the foreign minister…should never be considered substitution for the transparency Brazil owes its people.”

CEJIL’s Krsticevic is similarly calling for “a transparent, open discussion at the level of the political organs” in upcoming months. “This is key if we’re talking about a system that covers everybody – this can’t be only about governments.”