An indigenous community in the United States has filed a petition against the federal government, alleging that officials have repeatedly broken treaties and that the court system has failed to offer remedy.

The petition was filed by the Onondaga Nation, a Native American tribe and one of more than 650 sovereign peoples recognised by the U.S. government. Onondaga representatives are calling on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), the human rights arm of the pan-regional Organisation of American States (OAS), to intervene.“We understand that the U.S. does not adhere to the OAS, but I don’t know where we go. We’ve exhausted our avenues.” -- Onondaga leader Sid Hill

In 2005, the Onondaga Nation filed a case against New York State, stating the state government had repeatedly violated treaties signed with the Onondaga, resulting in lost land and severe environmental pollution. Yet advocates for the trips say antiquated legal precedents with racist roots have allowed the courts to consistently dismiss the Onondaga’s case.

They are now looking to the IACHR for justice.

“New York State broke the law and now the U.S. government has failed to protect our lands, which they promised to us in treaties,” Sid Hill, the Tadodaho, or spiritual leader, of the Onondaga people, told IPS.

Hill and others from the Onondaga Nation gathered outside the White House, located near the IACHR’s Washington headquarters, on Tuesday. Hill brought an heirloom belt commissioned for the Onondaga Nation by George Washington, the first U.S. president, to ratify the Treaty of Canandaigua, affirming land rights for the Onondaga and other tribes.

In their petition to the IACHR, the Onondaga quote sections from the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790. Signed by George Washington, this law assured the Onondaga that their lands would be safe, and if threatened, that the federal courts would protect their rights.

Yet since then, tribal advocates say, their 2.5 million acres of land has shrunk to just 6,900 acres. And rather than helping the Onondaga, the courts have ignored their case.

“We filed the original case in 2005,” Joe Heath, the attorney for the Onondaga Nation, told IPS.

“We did not sue, did not demand any return for original land. It was more aimed at protecting sacred sites and environmental issues … Our case was dismissed in 2010, so we appealed to the Second Circuit.”

The Second Circuit, and finally the Supreme Court, dismissed the case.

Landmark law

Since 2005, the U.S. courts have designed a new set of rules, called “equitable defence”. This now arms New York with a two-part defence in the Onondaga case. First, officials are able to argue that too much time has passed since the 1794 treaty was signed to when the case was filed, in 2005.

Second, equitable defence also states that the court is able to determine on its own whether the Onondaga people have been disturbed on their land.

“The legal ground on which [the Onondaga] claims rest has undergone profound change since the Nation initiated its action,” the District Court concluded. “The law today forecloses this Court from permitting these claims to proceed.”

The Onondaga Nation and other Native American nations are now fighting to change Native American land laws.

Current legal precedents go back to the 1400s, when Pope Alexander VI issued a papal decree that gave European monarchs sovereignty over “lands occupied by non-Christian ‘barbarous nations’”. In a case in 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court applied this principle to uphold the possession of indigenous lands in favour of colonial or post-colonial governments.

The Supreme Court again revived this doctrine as recent as 2005, when another New York tribe, the Oneida Nation, refused to pay taxes to the United States, citing its status as a sovereign nation.

“Under the Doctrine of Discovery … fee title to the land occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign – first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the 2005 decision.

This doctrine still underpins Indian land law and the dismissal of the Onondaga Nation’s case.

“This is the Plessy v. Ferguson of Indian law,” Heath told IPS, referring to a notorious landmark judicial decision that, for a time, upheld racial segregation in the United States.

Most polluted lake

Heath and others say the goal in “correcting” the U.S. legal system would be to provide the Onondaga Nation and other tribes more say in environmental decisions. Front and centre in this argument is the travesty they say has been visited on Onondaga Lake.

“Onondaga Lake, a sacred lake, has been turned into the most polluted lake in the country,” Heath says. “Allied Corp. dumped mercury in the lake every day from 1946 to 1970.”

In 1999, Allied Corp., a major chemicals company, purchased Honeywell, a company popularly associated with thermostats, and adopted its name, to try and shed its association with pollution. However, this merger has made it more difficult for the Onondaga Nation to get the company to clean up the lake.

“Before the Europeans got here, we had a very healthy lifestyle,” Heath said.

“All the water was clean and drinkable … With the loss of land, pollution of water, and loss of access to water, health has been impacted negatively.”

Another problem is salt mining.

“Only one body of water flows through the territory, Onondaga Creek, and this creek is now severely polluted as a result of salt mining upstream,” Heath says. “The salt mining was done over a century, and so recklessly that it severely damaged the hydrogeology in the valley.”

Heath says elder members of the Onondaga community can remember clear waters that supported trout fishing.

“Now you can’t see two inches into the water, it looks like yesterday’s coffee,” he says.

The Onondaga Nation is now waiting to see whether IACHR will hear the case.

This normally takes several years, however. And even if the court hears the case, it has no formal enforcement mechanisms, but can only make recommendations to the United States.

“We understand that the U.S. does not adhere to the OAS,” Onondaga leader Hill said. “But I don’t know where we go. We’ve exhausted our avenues.”

At the bustling border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Credit: Dan Boarder/cc by 2.0

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 27 2013 (IPS)

Outraged at a court ruling that would potentially render stateless thousands of Dominican people of Haitian descent, the Caribbean Community on Tuesday suspended the Dominican Republic’s bid to join the 15-member regional grouping.

Dominican President Danilo Medina had reportedly promised that his government would not actually deport any of the persons affected by the Sep. 23 ruling.“It renders an already marginalised section of the Dominican population even more vulnerable to acts of daily discrimination and abuse." -- Prof. Norman Girvan

However, Michel Martelly, Haiti’s president, said that soon after returning from Venezuela last weekend where he held talks with Dominican officials to resolve the issue, the authorities in Santo Domingo deported 300 people “who do not know the country, who do not have family in Haiti and who do not even speak the language.”

Martelly is threatening to stay away from future talks – the next round is scheduled for next week – if the Dominican Republic does not show some form of goodwill.

“We don’t have to keep meeting without them showing some action,” he told IPS, adding that the deportees included children, some “as old as one day”.

Trinidadian Prime Minister and CARICOM chair Kamla Persad-Bissessar vowed to raise the matter with the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). A delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) is also visiting the Dominican Republic early next month.

“It is especially repugnant that the ruling ignores the 2005 recommendations made by the IACHR that the Dominican Republic adapts its immigration laws and practices in accordance with the provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights,” she said. “The ruling also violates the Dominican Republic’s international human rights obligations.”

St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, who had written two letters to President Medina on the issue, said he was also prepared to push for the suspension of the Dominican Republic from the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas and the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM).

He told IPS that “quiet diplomacy” has led nowhere and “clearly we have to up the ante for the government and the relevant authority to act”.

At the heart of the controversy is the stripping of citizenship from children of Haitian migrants. The decision applies to those born after 1929 — a category that overwhelmingly includes descendants of Haitians brought in to work on farms.

CARICOM had come under increasing pressure from civil society groups in the region to respond strongly. Caribbean organisations that met in Colombia last week condemned the ruling as “immoral, unjust and totally unacceptable”.

“It renders an already marginalised section of the Dominican population even more vulnerable to acts of daily discrimination and abuse based on the colour of their skin and/or the sound of their names,” former ACS secretary general Professor Norman Girvan told IPS.

Caricom has an opportunity to “prevent a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.

But efforts to pressure the Dominican Republic to soften the ruling – only the latest salvo in decades of cultural and economic tensions between the two nations – will likely prove an uphill task.

Earlier this month, Anibal De Castro, the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to the United Sates, responding to an article published in a Trinidad and Tobago newspaper, made it clear that his country “does not grant citizenship to all those born within its jurisdiction.”

“In fact, the United States is one of the few nations that maintain this practice. In most countries, it is the norm that citizenship be obtained by origin or conferred under certain conditions. Since 1929, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic has established that the children of people in transit, a temporary legal status, are not eligible for Dominican citizenship,” he wrote.

On Nov. 6, hundreds of people rallied in Santo Domingo in support of the ruling, even suggesting the erection of a wall to ensure the division of Hispaniola that is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Emilo Santana of the group Night Watch of San Juan claimed that many Dominicans were unable to receive health services because the resources were being used to assist Haitians and urged President Medina to prevent a “silent and massive Haitian take-over of the territory.”

“I feel humiliated and angry, but not by my president, I feel humiliated by those NGOs that negotiate with the poverty of Haitians and it is they who are destroying our country,” Santana said at the rally.

Another speaker, jurist Juan Manuel Castillo Pantaleon, said the Constitutional Court “has aroused all Dominicans to defend as one man our national sovereignty”.

He described the ruling as a landmark “because it clearly defines who we Dominicans are and reaffirms the laws and institutions, as provided in the Constitution.

“The hypocritical international community which offered aid to Haiti never kept their promises and in some cases committed robbery, and intends that we Dominicans should assume responsibility for a failed state,” said Castillo Pantaleon.

A United Nations-supported study released this year estimated that there were around 210,000 Dominican-born people of Haitian descent and another 34,000 born to parents of other nationalities.

The government of the Dominican Republic estimates that around 500,000 people born in Haiti live in the Dominican Republic.

In a statement, CARICOM said it was calling on the global community to pressure the Dominican Republic to “adopt urgent measures to ensure that the jaundiced decision of the Constitutional Court does not stand”.

“The government must show good faith by immediate credible steps as part of an overall plan to resolve the nationality and attendant issues in the shortest possible time.”

A tunnel in Chile's El Teniente mine, the world's largest underground mine. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 1 2013 (IPS)

Civil society groups from throughout Latin America are urging “home countries” to take greater responsibility for the actions of their companies abroad, particularly those in the extractives industry.

“We would like to be able to influence policies that are being developed around the supply of minerals for various purposes – a lot of these policies are being framed as having to do with national defence, so there’s practically a guarantee that these reserves must continue to be supplied,” Pedro Landa, with the Honduran Centre for Collective Development, told IPS in Spanish."It is not just the host states that have a responsibility in this regard, but also the home states, where these companies come from.” -- Katya Salazar

“But that’s making these companies more aggressive in our countries … Oftentimes these companies are more powerful than the governments, and can simply buy off officials.”

Several groups are currently in Washington to speak on the topic with U.S. lawmakers and to testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the primary rights forum of the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS), which has its headquarters here.

The groups are warning that legal frameworks throughout Latin American countries have been overhauled in recent years such that, today, pro-business policies have made it extremely difficult for local communities to oppose mining proposals in their vicinities.

“Honduras is considered one of the most violent countries in the world, with a homicide rate of 86 per 100,000 residents, but this level of crime is very closely linked to the conditions in our country that also have to do with the extractive model,” Landa told a briefing on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

“In countries like Honduras, where there is a lot of social upheaval, it’s easy to pass laws that facilitate the extractive industries, especially mining. But these laws have been harmonised to be in concordance with the free trade agreements that our countries have signed … while many of the proposals have been put forth or influenced by the transnational corporations themselves.”

The United States in particular passed a slew of free trade agreements with Latin American countries during the 1990s, during the process of which the U.S. government mandated labour and trade concessions that, in the eyes of many, gave inordinate power to multinational mining companies. Landa says that the result today is a lack of adequate mechanisms by which local communities can oppose these industries – in any Latin American country.

In part because of trade agreements but also in part because of high global prices for minerals, Latin America has become a hotbed of extractives speculation in recent years. Simultaneously, local communities have seen their legal rights to oppose these projects curtailed.

“Since the 1990s in the region there’s been an expansion of investment in the natural resource sector, as part of the globalisation process and part of the privatisation of state-owned industries, and also linked to the growing global power of China and other developing countries,” Keith Slack, extractive industries global programme manager for Oxfam America, a humanitarian group and host of Thursday’s briefing, told IPS.

“Quite directly related to this increased interest has come this increased level of conflict, protest and social disruption.”

Much of this disruption is taking place in indigenous lands, compounding a broader issue in many countries where indigenous communities continue to struggle for agency and rights afforded other citizens. At the moment, most multinational companies do not appear to be adequately prepared for this complexity.

According to a new report released Wednesday by First Peoples, an advocacy group, just 5 of 52 U.S. companies surveyed had policies in place for “productively engaging” with indigenous communities. Indeed, some communities are feeling pressure from multiple companies interested in extraction projects.

“We’re noticing a broad trend in which companies operating in close proximity acquire ‘spillover’ risk from one another,” Nick Pelosi, a grants assistant with First Peoples, told IPS, pointing to such a situation around Neuquen, in Argentina. “In such scenarios, the positive policies and practices of individual companies are overwhelmed by the cumulative negative impacts of all companies in the region.”

New paradigm

Activists are now particularly focusing on trying to strengthen opportunities for local communities in Latin America and elsewhere to pursue judicial remedies for human rights violations in mining companies’ home countries. On Friday, this “home state” responsibility will be discussed for the first time before the IACHR, and proponents suggest that it could offer a new paradigm within international law.

“The Inter-American system and the United Nations have been focused on the responsibility of host states, where these violations happen,” Katya Salazar, executive director of the Due Process of Law Foundation, a Washington watchdog group, told the hearing on Thursday. “But we want to propose something new: it is not just the host states that have a responsibility in this regard, but also the home states, where these companies come from.”

Today, some 60 percent of the foreign mining companies in Latin America are Canadian, and as such last year Salazar and others requested an IACHR hearing specifically on home state responsibility for Canada. Although that hearing was turned down, Salazar notes that Friday’s more general hearing on the topic should be able to lead to a new discussion.

“Ten years ago we didn’t discuss women’s rights with the commission, while five years ago we didn’t discuss indigenous rights – but now these are common topics,” she told IPS.

“Similarly, today the discussion on the responsibility of home states is not yet a discussion at the commission. But the idea is that this hearing will open a window of new legal discussions within the Inter-American system.”

The ability of local communities to use the U.S. legal system to seek redressal for rights violations received a significant setback earlier this year. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow a group of Nigerian plaintiffs to sue the Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum Company in U.S. court, finding that Shell’s connection to the United States was too tenuous.

Yet critics of the decision say that this is precisely the purpose for which the law in question – known as the Alien Tort Statute – was created.

“When Alien Tort claims are no longer effective in helping people to get responses to violations of their rights, what other tools exist?” Dora Lucy Arias, with the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Committee, a Colombian NGO, said Thursday, discussing some of the activists’ lobby efforts on Capitol Hill.

“So I’m wondering if, from Congress, we may be able to think about some new and really effective mechanisms to make sure that the victims of these human rights violations have some recourse.”

Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio used chain gangs and a "tent city" in his crusade against undocumented immigrants in the state. He has been sued more than 2,000 times and is now is overseen by a federal monitor. Credit:Valeria Fernandez/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

Saul Merlos is an undocumented migrant from El Salvador. About two years ago, he was living and working in the southern U.S. city of New Orleans.

“One day, our employers told us we were going to get paid, but instead they sent immigration,” he told IPS. “I was a witness to the raid, where they got 55 of us.”"People are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school." -- Jennifer Rosenbaum of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice

Merlos said the raid was violent. “I was a witness that there was a pregnant woman with her daughter, but they didn’t care,” he said. “They yelled at her, and at all of us, that this was their country and asked us what we were doing in their country. They hit some of us, and didn’t even allow me to use the restroom.”

Speaking to IPS on the sidelines of a hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Monday, Merlos added that the immigration officers did not read the workers their rights or inform them of what to expect from the detention process.

As momentum builds for U.S. immigration reform after months of political deadlock, a group of NGOs and immigration lawyers are warning that the U.S. system is currently leading to widespread violations of immigrants’ human rights.

The accusations come as the IACHR, the region’s pre-eminent rights forum, began an investigation into the issue on Monday. At that hearing, held at the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) headquarters in Washington, advocates questioned the rights standards used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (ICE).

According to the witnesses, ICE officers may have violated immigrants’ basic human rights by indefinitely separating them from their U.S. citizen children, in addition to having detained them without appropriate constitutional protections.  

Family focus

At Monday’s hearing, multiple advocacy groups alleged that ICE detention practices have failed to account for the human rights of parties involved when officers use what is known as their prosecutorial discretion. This refers to a federal agency’s authority, in immigration cases, to decide whether to begin removal proceedings against undocumented migrants.

Saul Merlos has been in the United States for 18 years, and has a 13-year old daughter who is a U.S. citizen. A favourable exercise of prosecutorial discretion would avoid him being deported Dec. 17, 2013.

“All we want is for the U.S. government to stop this because they are separating our families,” Merlos said.

The place of human rights in immigration proceedings has emerged as a key point of discussion in recent months in situations in which the children are U.S. citizens but at least one of the parents is deported because of their illegal status. Most of the time, this means that families are separated for indefinite amounts of time.

“We need to realise the serious concerns raised by the way people are being arrested and the way the U.S. government is pursuing these prosecutions.” Jennifer Rosenbaum, the legal director at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The government’s failure to use its prosecutorial discretion has led to families being separated and to children being separated from their parents,” she said.

NOWCRJ and several other groups are calling on U.S. ICE officers to consider rights norms when detaining illegal immigrants or considering initiating removal proceedings against them. According to data presented before the IACHR this week, U.S. immigration agencies have largely failed to use their prosecutorial discretion, choosing instead to deport thousands of illegal immigrants with no regard to their family ties.

Yet others raise separate concerns about the possible implications of more lenient behaviour on the part of ICE.

“We should remember that the government isn’t actually separating families, as the parent is choosing to leave his or her child behind,” Jon Feere, a legal policy analyst at the Centre for Immigration Studies (CIS), a non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

“Moreover, it probably shouldn’t be standard U.S. policy that people can’t be deported if they have children, because there’s the question of where exactly you’re going to draw the line. If the parent has engaged in criminal activity such as identity theft, or has broken serious laws, are we saying that the American victim is not going to receive any restitution just because that immigrant has a child?”

Rights advocates, on the other hand, suggest that in the majority of related cases, immigrants are stopped and detained unconstitutionally in the first place.

“In New Orleans and other communities across the country, people are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school,” NOWCRJ’s Rosenbaum said. “Their apprehensions involve the inappropriate use of force and no due process protections. What is even more worrying is that most of them are the victims of outright racial profiling.”

In 2012, as many as 150,000 U.S. citizen children saw at least one of their parents get deported, according to information presented Monday at the IACHR.

The U.S. delegation to the OAS was not able to respond to the panel’s allegations.

“Unfortunately, the federal government shutdown prevented us from properly preparing for today’s hearings, as officers were not able to collect any evidence and witnesses,” Lawrence J. Gumbiner, the deputy U.S. permanent representative at the U.S. mission to the OAS said. Gumbiner later declined to comment further on the human rights implications of the allegations.

Washington gridlock

The hearing comes at a critical time, as Congress recently resumed its work on a proposal that would massively overhaul the United States’ sprawling immigration system. As the House of Representatives looks more closely at the comprehensive Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernisation Act approved by the Senate last June, President Obama urged all in Washington to come together and fix the country’s “broken immigration system”.

House Republicans oppose comprehensive immigration reform, which they worry would force them to accept some provisions that they dislike, particularly a contentious “path to citizenship” for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. Instead, House conservatives have broken apart the many issues in play in the reform push and started passing piecemeal legislation.

“One of the major concerns is that yet another comprehensive immigration bill will only bring more illegal immigration in the country,” CIS’s Feere told IPS. “Right now, many Americans simply do not trust the president to actually go through with the bill’s enforcement provisions.”

U.S. snooping into Brazilian official affairs included monitoring of the state oil company, Petrobras. Credit: Molly Mazilu/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

As the first formal probe by an international rights body into allegations of U.S. mass surveillance began here Monday, privacy advocates from throughout the Americas accused Washington of violating international covenants and endangering civil society.

Monday’s hearing took place before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an arm of the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS), which includes the United States."The unofficial response from Washington – ‘Grow up, everybody does this kind of spying’ – was very unappreciated by many in the region." -- Joy Olson of WOLA

The heads of Brazil and Mexico are among the 35 world leaders on whose personal calls the NSA has reportedly been eavesdropping, according to new information made public last week but leaked earlier this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Indeed, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has offered perhaps the most strident diplomatic response yet, cancelling a state visit to Washington in September upon being notified of U.S. snooping into Brazilian official affairs, including monitoring of the state oil company. Brazil is also leading a push to institute a new international agreement on privacy.

“I was in Brazil right after these revelations came out, and my sense is that this goes back to this idea of U.S. exceptionalism – that it operates by one standard and everyone else operates by another. Other countries are increasingly less willing to accept that this is how the U.S. functions in the world,” Joy Olson, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a watchdog group here, told IPS.

“Further, the unofficial response from Washington – ‘Grow up, everybody does this kind of spying’ – was very unappreciated by many in the region. That just served as confirmation that the U.S. doesn’t understand its evolving relationship with Latin America.”

The IACHR investigation could now indicate a more concerted reaction from Latin American countries, joining new opprobrium from European and other world leaders as well as an ongoing national discussion here over the scope of U.S. spying on private citizens.

“While the United States is having a huge debate over the legality or constitutionality of domestic mass surveillance, there’s been very little discussion of the legality of international mass surveillance,” Danny O’Brien, international director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital privacy advocacy group, told IPS.

“The worrying truth is that we have almost no safeguards in place regarding the surveillance of anyone outside of the U.S. That’s problematic because domestic laws were written with the assumption that the people we targeted were agents of a foreign power, spies or even major political figures abroad – not, say, everyone in a particular country.”

For its part, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has maintained that its surveillance programmes, which could be gathering data on the phone or online activities of upwards of a billion people, follow U.S. law and do not violate the privacy of U.S. citizens or foreigners within the United States.

In fact, increasing evidence suggests that regular exceptions have been made to these guidelines, but globally activists are increasingly frustrated with the U.S.’s refusal even to indicate that it is adhering to the spirit of international human rights norms.

The Washington-based IACHR, for instance, oversees the American Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1969, which explicitly guarantees the right to privacy. (While the United States has not ratified the American Convention, it did sign it in 1977.) Critics now want the IACHR to censure the United States for violation of this and other international norms.

“According to the U.S. explanations, all measures have supposedly been taken to respect the privacy of American citizens and those in US territories, however no legal protections apply to foreign nationals,” the Brazilian office of Article 19, an anti-censorship group, told IPS in a statement.

“By basing its justifications and actions solely on domestic law … the U.S. government has shown disregard for the universality of human rights and the fact that international human rights standards on privacy and freedom of expression and information apply to all, irrespective of borders.”

The United States was represented by four officials at Monday’s session, but none offered any formal response. Stating that the recent 16-day shutdown of the U.S. federal government had halted preparations for the hearing, the officials only promised a written response within a month.

While President Obama himself has suggested that politically sensitive spying on allied leaders would stop, on Tuesday two bills were slated to be proposed on Congress to rein in broader aspects of the NSA’s surveillance activities. Neither of those, however, would offer additional safeguards for those outside of U.S. territory.

Questioning exceptionalism

In a formal submission made to the IACHR on Monday, EFF, Article 19 and several Latin American civil society groups warned that several countries in the region were already struggling under heavy-handed government surveillance tactics, and expressed concern over the ramifications of the new U.S. revelations.

“For many individuals throughout the Americas region, especially journalists and dissidents, the Internet and mobile telephony have been transformed into a threat. The use of these mediums is difficult or almost impossible without the risk of state interference,” the submission states.

“Even if no single person is actually listening, the chilling effects of surveillance are felt, as the risk of revealing a journalistic source or legal client, for example, may be too high … Freedom of expression and freedom of information allow human rights defenders to challenge abuses to human rights; without the privacy to conduct investigations and communications away from the prying eyes of the state, this becomes impossible.”

It is unclear whether Washington’s spying could now embolden government surveillance in parts of Latin America. Yet even in the current climate, in which governments and civil society together are decrying U.S. snooping, EFF’s O’Brien warns that the focus on the United States could divert some important focus.

“Given the United States’ previous involvement in Latin American politics,” he says, “one of the biggest consequences could be that any surveillance discussion is going to emphasise the U.S.’s surveillance, while potentially underplaying the future risk of more local surveillance.”

The IACHR commissioners could now take a range of actions. Either way, the commission will publish a report on its findings, yet advocates are hoping that the commission will also refer the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in Costa Rica.

Although the United States does not recognise the Inter-American Court, more than 30 other countries do. A decision against the U.S. there would be damaging and could do much to influence the decisions of other human rights institutions as well as the roiling diplomatic atmosphere surrounding the surveillance allegations.

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.”

The 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) on Friday voted unanimously to approve a series of reforms to the Inter-American human rights system, but stepped back from proposals that had caused the greatest concern among civil society groups.

Nonetheless, rights advocates are expressing frustration that Friday’s highly anticipated vote did not bring a close to the reforms process. Instead, the final resolution mandates the OAS “to continue the dialogue regarding the core aspects for strengthening” the Inter-American system, which includes the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and Court of Human Rights.

“By adopting this document, the states [are] supporting essential elements of a robust system that will continue to be relevant into the future,” Lisa Reinsberg, executive director of the International Justice Resource Center, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“However, our hope had been that today’s session would definitively put an end to debate on the reform process. Instead, the commission will now be required to invest more time and resources into responding to suggestions, diverting attention away from important human rights concerns.”

The controversial two-year reforms process had been seen as potentially devastating for a system lauded by the rights community but which has increasingly frustrated governments of the region. Since its creation in 1959, the IACHR has proven to be one of the most effective parts of the otherwise largely moribund OAS, since 1978 overseeing the American Convention on Human Rights.

While the push for reforms is officially characterised as a strengthening process, it has been spearheaded by the governments of Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, each of which have expressed dissatisfaction with the current system.

“It is important to remember that it is the commission that has the authority to modify its rules and practices, and that the commission is intended to be autonomous from the OAS political organs,” Reinsberg says, noting that on Monday the IACHR passed new Rules of Procedure.

“Overall, those changes are generally positive and increase transparency for users of the Inter-American system. While the changes include some concessions to states, the commission held its ground where it mattered.”

No “real strengthening”

Meanwhile, longstanding worries over the broader strength of the system – particularly its chronic underfunding – were only partially addressed. Indeed, the funding issue goes to the heart of the debate on both sides.

“This process did not achieve a real strengthening of the Inter-American System … nor has the process resulted in an increase in funding,” Tirza Flores, a Honduran magistrate, stated in Spanish outside the OAS headquarters Friday morning, speaking on behalf of more than 150 NGOs and thousands of petitioners.

“We call on the states to comply with their obligation to finance the commission, instead of suffocating it by limiting or conditioning its external funding.”

Flores, too, called for an end to the “political process” of revising the system’s procedures. Yet this was upset by a last-minute proposal by Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua to “continue the dialogue”, stating that the reforms process had “failed to complete its work”.

In their resolution, the four countries called for discussion to continue on a half-dozen issues. These included precautionary measures (the power to require immediate action to protect groups or individuals), the commission’s annual publication on the human rights records of individual countries, and the functioning of the thematic rapporteurs.

This bloc is also demanding discussion on longstanding frustrations that the Inter-American system is inordinately controlled by the United States and other “external” countries.

These disagreements led several delegations to express concern that Friday’s vote would bring the Inter-American system a step closer to fracturing, particularly as Ecuador and Bolivia nearly refused to vote for the final resolution. Venezuela and Trinidad & Tobago have already stated they will withdraw from the system, while Ecuador and Bolivia have now issued similar warnings.

Funding discrepancy

On Friday, this schism played out in the backroom negotiations over the resolution’s final wording.

These revolved around three particular disagreements: over the implications of “full financing” of the IACHR, over whether the system’s external funding should be able to be “earmarked”, and, especially, over attempts to “strengthen” and “adequately finance” the thematic rapporteurships.

Much of the frustration expressed by these countries and others on Friday dealt with a central discrepancy at the heart of the Inter-American system.

On the one hand, the United States is the IACHR’s largest single funder – offering around 1.3 of its 10-million-dollar annual budget – and hosts its headquarters. On the other hand, for decades Washington (and Canada, another prominent funder) has refused to sign on to the American Convention on Human Rights.

To make matters worse, around a third of the Inter-American system’s budget comes from the European Union, which is otherwise not connected to the system.

“The control and definition of its policies are not in our hands, but rather are in the hands of others,” Ricardo Patino, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, stated in Spanish-language testimony on Friday, calling the situation ridiculous and unacceptable.

The impact of this funding discrepancy, Patino suggested, is that the Inter-American system reflects the ideology and priorities of its primary donors rather than of the rest of the member states. For instance, he noted, the IACHR rapporteurship on freedom of expression – seen as a darling of the United States and European Union – receives far more funding than do others on women, children or economic justice.

Patino also proposed creating a new rapporteurship, on torture and extrajudicial killing, while making references to the United States’ armed “drone” programme. He also promised that Ecuador would pay for such a position.

This would be a significant turnaround, as Ecuador reportedly offered just 1,500 dollars in funding to the Inter-American system over the past three years. Likewise, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua made no donations between 2010 and 2012.

“A clear majority of the region’s governments support the commission’s response to the reforms process,” Viviana Krsticevic, executive director of the Center for Justice and International Law, a Washington advocacy group, said in a statement to IPS immediately following the resolution’s vote.

“However, the governments did not pledge the additional 10 million dollars needed for the Commission to function effectively.”

On Friday, nearly all delegations made pleas for the countries of the Americas to come together, take ownership of and fully fund the Inter-American system – at a cost, one delegate noted, of just two cents per citizen. With the new resolution likewise reaffirming its commitment to provide “full funding” for the Inter-American system, this is now a point on which all of the region’s countries, for the moment, formally agree.

Salvadoran activists Carlos Santos (left) and Fabricio Santín alongside a papier-mâché sculpture of a torture victim with a plastic bag – “la capucha” - on his head. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Mar 21 2013 (IPS)

A report containing the testimonies of victims of torture during El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war will be published 27 years after it was written, to help Salvadorans today learn more about that chapter in the country’s history.

The 197-page book “La tortura en El Salvador” (Torture in El Salvador), to be launched in April, contains the accounts of 270 victims interviewed in 1986, in the heat of the civil war, by the non-governmental Human Rights Commission of El Salvador (CDHES). IPS was given exclusive access to the report prior to publication.

Most of the interviews were carried out in the La Esperanza prison on the outskirts of San Salvador by members of the CDHES who had also been arrested, tortured and later imprisoned in that facility, where many of the country’s political prisoners were held in the 1980s.

“In the 1980s it was impossible to publish the document, because of the repression. But finally it will see the light of day,” CDHES director Miguel Montenegro told IPS.

El Salvador’s 12-year civil war left 75,000 – mainly civilians – dead and 8,000 disappeared.

When a peace agreement put an end to the conflict, a lack of funds stood in the way of publication of the report, Montenegro said.

The activist was seized in 1986 by the notorious Treasury Police, and learned first-hand about the torture techniques practiced by the security forces.

Because of their involvement in serious human rights abuses, the National Police, the Treasury Police and the National Guard were dismantled and replaced by the National Civilian Police under the United Nations-sponsored peace accord reached in January 1992 by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas and the government of Alfredo Cristiani of the far-right National Republican Alliance (ARENA).

More than 40 torture techniques are described in detail and depicted in drawings in the report.

One of the most commonly used techniques was the “avioncito” (airplane), in which the victim’s hands were tied behind his or her back and the victim was suspended in the air from the wrists, often causing dislocation of the shoulders.

In the “capucha” (hood), a plastic bag was placed over the prisoner’s head, to partially suffocate them, while the “submarino” (submarine) involved simulated drowning.

Other methods were electric shock, cutting off the tongue, or destroying the eyes with chemicals.

“They would take me to a room in the Treasury Police headquarters in San Salvador where the walls and the floor were covered with dried blood,” Montenegro said.

The book also provides profiles of torture victims who were forcibly disappeared.

The abuses formed part of a state policy put into effect by the army high command, and Salvadoran society has a right to know what happened, Montenegro said.

The amnesty law approved by Congress in 1993 protected the perpetrators of war crimes and other human rights abuses committed during the conflict from prosecution.

But retired generals Eugenio Vides Casanova and José Guillermo García, both of whom served as defence minister in the 1980s, were found guilty in 2002 by a U.S. court for the torture of three civilians by units under their command. The court ordered the two retired officers to pay 54.6 million dollars in damages to the civilians.

The CDHES document is coming out shortly after an investigative report by the BBC and The Guardian, published as a documentary on Mar. 5, revealed that retired U.S. Colonel James Steele, a Special Forces veteran of Vietnam who was posted in El Salvador in the 1980s, was later sent to Iraq.

The British media report said Steele, who trained and directed counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador, was sent to Iraq to implement the so-called “Salvadoran option” to fight the insurgency after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 10 years ago.

Steele was reportedly sent to train special Iraqi police brigades in torture techniques employed in this Central American country in the 1980s.

“It is sad that what was used here in El Salvador is being revived in Iraq; this country served as the school,” Montenegro said.

Another investigation into torture committed during the civil war is being conducted by the Salvadoran Association of Torture Survivors (ASST), founded three years ago.

The ASST has two aims: to find out what happened and to bring complaints before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). “We are documenting the cases, to file formal complaints,” Carlos Santos, the president of the ASST, told IPS.

Santos was studying theatre when he was arrested in 1983 along with another student, Fabricio Santín, in the eastern city of San Miguel, where they were tortured before they were transferred to La Esperanza prison.

“Because no one was ever held accountable or punished for the abuses, there is a risk that they could be committed again in the future,” said Santín. “And that is what we don’t want.”

In 2012, the IACHR accepted a complaint brought by the Human Rights Institute of the Central American University in representation of Santos and Rolando González, another member of the ASST.

The complaint also covers four other cases, including the death of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, who was killed in 1975 by fellow members of one of the left-wing groups that made up the FMLN, after he was found guilty of insubordination and spying for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in a “revolutionary trial”.

The case brought before the IACHR accuses the current government of centre-left President Mauricio Funes of the FMLN of negligence with respect to investigating crimes like torture.

The Funes administration has refused to sign the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, which provides for in situ monitoring such as unannounced visits to local prisons.

Nor has it ratified the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court set up to try war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity that national courts cannot or will not handle.

“These are the things that worry us, because they hinder progress in the search for truth, justice and reparations,” the president of the Committee of Relatives of Victims of Human Rights Violations (CODEFAM), Guadalupe Mejía, told IPS.

David Morales, director general of the government’s Human Rights Unit, declined to comment to IPS on government policy.

Since September 2012, Santos and Santín have been touring the country with the exhibit “Nunca más en El Salvador” (Never Again in El Salvador), which uses papier-mâché sculptures of people to show torture techniques used during the years of state violence.

“Some of the images are shocking, but we want to show them so that this won’t happen again,” Santín said.

Six women recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday lauded the work of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), offering additional high-level support for the institution just weeks ahead of a critical vote on a reforms process that many worry could irreparably weaken the Inter-American system.

In an open letter released on International Women’s Day, the six recipients note the IACHR has been responsible for exposing human rights violations suffered by “millions” of women and girls in the Americas.Our concern is what the impact might be on women human rights defenders, should the powers of the Inter-American system be curtailed.

They also recognise the half-century-old institution as a “pioneer in recognizing and incorporating the needs and suggestions expressed by the feminist and women’s movement, and in capturing them in protective mechanisms, as well as exposing discrimination against women in legal frameworks and in State practices.”

The letter was spearheaded by Jody Williams, a 1997 Nobel laureate from the United States recognised in particular for her work on banning landmines, and currently chair of the Nobel Women’s Initiative. She was joined by Nobel awardees from the past three-plus decades, including Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Mairead Maguire, Shirin Ebadi, Lehmah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman.

“[W]e need the [Inter-American system] to be strong, independent, autonomous, and efficient in order to continue responding in a timely manner to human rights violations,” they wrote.

“Today, we express our gratitude and our most energetic support … [and] call on the governments of the Americas to express their unequivocal support for the Inter-American System for its role in defending the human rights of all.”

Since its creation in 1959, the IACHR has proven to be one of the most effective parts of the otherwise largely moribund 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS). Since 1978, it has been tasked with overseeing the American Convention on Human Rights.

Yet in such work, the IACHR has run afoul of several of the region’s governments. Some – particularly Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, as well as Brazil and Peru – have recently moved to distance themselves from the system’s powers.

This push took on new energy in early 2012, when OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza capitulated to growing frustration and backed proposals for a suite of changes to IACHR rules of procedure. Ecuador is now trying to create a separate system altogether, while Venezuela has said it will step out of the Inter-American system by September.

Meanwhile, anxiety from grassroots organisations has continued to grow. In November, some 3,000 people, including multiple former presidents, signed a petition warning against the reforms.

Particular scrutiny has been given to proposals that could diminish the IACHR’s ability to publish reports on countries’ rights abuses, significantly weaken its rapporteur on freedom of expression, and moderate its ability to demand immediate actions to protect groups or individuals. (More information on the reforms process can be found here and here.)

“Our concern is what the impact might be on women human rights defenders, should the powers of the Inter-American system be curtailed,” Rachel Vincent, a Nobel Women’s Initiative coordinator of the new letter, told IPS.

“Women where we work are on the frontlines of defending their communities against, for instance, large-scale land grabs, and as a result face high levels of violence. But the state actors who should be protecting them are all too often part of the problem.”

Faced with high levels of impunity, she says, the Inter-American system offers such women their only potential avenue of recourse.

“Should this system be diluted, you would be hard-pressed to find another mechanism in the region that could so effectively help human rights defenders on the ground facing impunity in their own countries,” she says. “This is not isolated concern of any one group in any one country – it’s shared at the grassroots level throughout the region.”

Following a series of consultations in recent months, finalised reforms proposals are set to be voted upon on Mar. 22. On Friday, at the end of a two-day session at the OAS headquarters here in Washington, nearly all member states expressed support for the pending changes.

Convention tinkering

The Nobel letter comes the day after civil society organisations were given a third and final opportunity to voice their concerns over the reforms process. While that consultation process has been criticised for being cursory, it does appear that the member states have taken certain recommendations into consideration, including over issues of transparency.

Yet Thursday’s proceedings also included an announcement that reportedly surprised activists and state representatives alike.

The Nicaraguan ambassador, Denis Ronaldo Moncada Colindres, who currently holds the OAS Permanent Council’s rotating presidency, tabled a resolution proposing reforms to the American Convention on Human Rights itself. The proposal, which some say was drafted without the knowledge of OAS diplomats, runs counter to recommendations made by a working group on the IACHR process.

“That was certainly a shock, given that many countries and civil society organisations thought there was already overwhelming consensus on following the working group’s recommendations that there was no need for reform of the convention,” Viviana Krsticevic, executive director of the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), a Washington advocacy group, told IPS.

“To have the president of the Permanent Council come out with a position so radically different from the consensus – that was really out of the blue.”

The draft proposal would call on the OAS secretary-general to draw up proposed amendments to the convention based on recommendations made by states that are party to the convention. That would specifically exclude the United States and Canada among others, as they have not ratified the convention.

“Modifying some of this language could significantly impact the commission’s jurisdiction or procedures, so putting the convention on the table for modification is worrisome, to say the least,” Lisa Reinsberg, executive director of the International Justice Resource Center, a U.S. advocacy group, told IPS.

“It remains unclear why some states consider it desirable to make changes beyond those proposed by the commission itself, particularly when many of the proposals concern aspects of the commission’s work that are not governed in any detail by the … convention, such as the commission’s monitoring and promotion activities.”

OAS member states are now scheduled to discuss the Nicaragua proposal early next week. While a vote on the proposed IACHR reforms is scheduled for Mar. 22, Krsticevic says that thus far members have only engaged in substantive discussion on two out of seven major issues.

Colombia will be removed from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “blacklist” next year. In exchange, the government of Juan Manuel Santos facilitated a visit to the country by a delegation from the Commission.

For 12 years in a row, war-torn Colombia has been included in Chapter IV of the IACHR’s Annual Report, which singles out those countries with the most worrisome human rights situations. In 2012 the so-called blacklist included Colombia, Cuba, Honduras and Venezuela.

Colombia will now be the focus of a lengthier report, containing recommendations. In 2014, the IACHR will verify compliance with the recommendations. If Colombia has failed to comply, it could once again be included in Chapter IV in 2015.

But “the fact that a country report is being drawn up, rather than a country being included or not in Chapter IV, does not imply an improvement in human rights,” IACHR commissioner Felipe González said Friday Dec. 7 in Bogotá.

In fact the five IACHR commissioners who visited Colombia Dec. 3-7 observed “a serious humanitarian crisis” among those displaced from their homes by the civil war, who are “disproportionately” indigenous and black. It also documented threats faced by activists and homosexuals.

According to the IACHR’s preliminary observations from its in situ visit, between 8.6 and 11.2 percent of Colombia’s 47 million people have been forced to flee their homes by the internal armed conflict.

The rate at which people were displaced increased 63 percent in 2012, especially in the western and southern parts of the country, the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a prominent local human rights group, reported.

Colombians are fleeing fighting and death threats. But lately, the number of families leaving their homes to prevent the two main guerrilla groups – the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) – from recruiting their children has risen.

In addition, displaced persons in the southwestern department or province of Cauca told the IACHR that the authorities do not recognise them as victims because they were displaced by far-right groups that continued to be active after the demobilisation of the paramilitaries.

The commissioners visited Bogotá and the cities of Quibdó, Medellín and Popayán – the capitals, respectively, of the departments of the Chocó and Antioquia, in the northwest, and of Cauca.

González said they found “two different realities” in Colombia: while there are “sound institutions” in Bogotá, in the interior of the country “the state faces major obstacles to enforce the law and implement existing programmes,” due to “corruption at a local level, and a low level of political and social development.”

This is “especially seen in rural areas and with respect to certain population groups,” including blacks, who according to the IACHR, suffer “direct and indirect discrimination.”

González visited Popayán, the city that receives the largest number of displaced persons, in proportion to its population.

“We met with internally displaced persons, indigenous communities, women’s organisations, senior military officers, the governor, the ombudsman and the office of the public prosecutor. We observed a very complex situation. From the women, we received some specific complaints. But in general, they provided us with information that gave us an overview of the situation there,” the Chilean commissioner added.

The IACHR referred to “alarming information” on sexual violence against women by armed groups. Although according to the authorities, only one legal complaint has been filed, the regional ombudsman’s office found that cases were severely under-reported, especially when the perpetrators were members of the military.

“We told the military commanders about all of these reports we have been receiving,” González said. “We are going to remain in contact with them, while drafting our report.”

Many communities in Cauca are caught in the crossfire between government troops and the FARC, although the situation is changing now that peace talks have begun in Havana and the rebel group has declared a unilateral ceasefire.

Indigenous people in Colombia “are very worried about not being taken into account, or only in a marginal manner, and without meaningful participation in the negotiations,” said González, referring to the peace talks between the FARC and the Santos administration.

They believe that “eventually, part of the agreement could be that the FARC could maintain some reserves that are situated in indigenous territories.

“Of course, the IACHR encourages peace processes. But they have to be participative in nature, and they cannot be carried out at the cost of basic human rights standards,” he added.

”That puts the state in sort of a dilemma, but it would be regrettable if setbacks occurred after the important advances made by transitional justice in Colombia,” González said.

“History has shown that justice and reconciliation can be ‘married’,” he stated.

The IACHR, like the International Criminal Court, warned that an imminent constitutional reform that will expand the jurisdiction of military justice tribunals in Colombia would be “a serious setback, and would endanger the right of victims to justice.”

The Organisation of American States human rights body also said the reform contains “several provisions that would be incompatible with the American Convention on Human Rights.”

The IACHR pointed out, moreover, that judicial protection of fundamental rights “cannot be suspended, even in times of war.”

The pan-regional Organisation of American States (OAS) on Friday received a petition signed by more than 3,000 signatories from throughout the Americas, including four past presidents, expressing a host of concerns over current attempts to reform the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The event took place at the OAS’s Washington headquarters, during a final phase of input by civil society representatives on the reforms process. In recent months, many have become increasingly worried that the process could irreparably weaken the IACHR’s independence, making it more difficult both for victims of human rights violations to access the commission’s powers and for the commission to ensure that its decisions are implemented.

“These are actions that would limit, if not maim, the commission’s mandate and limit its autonomy,” Iduvina Hernandez Batres, director of the Asociacion para el Estudio y Promocion de la Seguridad en Democracia, a Guatemalan NGO, said in Spanish-language testimony at the OAS on Friday.

“The mechanisms for protection offered by the commission have been invaluable in the fight against impunity, against torture, for the rights of indigenous peoples, and in contributing to the promotion of economic, social and environmental rights … But none of this would have been possible without the guarantee of autonomy and independence.”

Since its creation in 1959, the IACHR has proven to be one of the most effective parts of the otherwise largely moribund 35-member OAS. The new petition, referred to as the Bogota Declaration after its creation in September in that city, cites several of the Inter-American system’s more notable successes, including on amnesty laws, extrajudicial execution and forced disappearance.

Today, under its mandate to ensure compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights, it continues to exert important influence in establishing guidelines on military jurisdiction and freedom of expression, and setting standards on equality across the region.

In such work, the IACHR has inevitably run up against government friction. Increasingly in recent years, certain governments – particularly Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, as well as Brazil and Peru – have moved to distance themselves from the system.

This push took on new energy in January, when OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza capitulated to growing frustration and backed proposals for a suite of changes to IACHR procedure. In September, Venezuela, long one of the harshest critics of the Inter-American system, announced that it would be leaving the system outright. (More information on the reforms process can be found here and here.)

At the OAS on Friday, many of those gathered, including representatives of 52 civil society organisations from throughout the hemisphere, admitted that the Inter-American system is indeed in need of certain reforms. Yet what could be an opportunity to strengthen the system now appears to be in danger of weakening it.

“When we look at human rights from a historical perspective, we can find just one conclusion,” warned Marco Romero, director of the Colombian Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento, on Friday. “Human rights systems are very difficult to build up but can very easily be torn asunder.”

De-funding efficacy

Despite its successes, the IACHR’s efficacy has always been undercut by a chronic lack of funding. In past years, its annual budget of only around four million dollars has severely impacted on the scope of its potential workload, a point prominently noted in the Bogota Declaration petition.

On Tuesday, Secretary-General Insulza proposed a major new initiative to rectify this situation, suggesting the creation of a new capital fund of around 100 million dollars. The proposal was reportedly “well received” by representatives on the OAS permanent council, but some have warned that the financing situation is indicative of a deeper lack of state interest in ensuring a robust Inter-American system.

“Governments, including that of the United States, need to step up their financial support. In 2011, the U.S. contributed 1.5 million dollars, while Spain, which isn’t even a member state, contributed one million,” Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)’s Human Rights Program, told IPS shortly after he presented to the OAS on Friday.

“This is not only a matter of continuing to effectively use resources, but the commission is simply underfunded. This impacts on its work, its effectiveness and its independence in delivering the kinds of protections for human rights that are expected.”

Dakwar suggests that such miserly funding reflects government hopes to keep the IACHR weak, though he notes that the Inter-American system nonetheless retains its importance as a court of last resort.

As example, he refers to the case of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen arrested in 2003 in Macedonia, spirited away to a “black site” and allegedly tortured under the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s extraordinary rendition programme on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities. He was later released on the realisation of mistaken identity, but Dakwar says the U.S. government has never acknowledged any mistreatment.

After El-Masri’s attempts to seek justice failed in the U.S. court system, in 2008 the ACLU brought a petition on his behalf before the IACHR. Although the Inter-American system accepted the petition, giving the U.S. government two months to respond, Dakwar says that Washington has never done so. (The U.S. has not ratified the American Convention on Human Rights but nonetheless remains a party to the commission.)

Yet in 2009, a similar petition was sent to the well-funded European Court of Human Rights. “On the contrary, El-Masri’s case will now be decided this coming Thursday by the highest European court,” he says. “Here you have an example of the U.S. government undermining democracy and rule of law, but more broadly we need to ensure that all governments work harder to implement the commission’s decisions.”

In coming weeks, IACHR and OAS officials will be making policy decisions that will do much to cement a new character for the Inter-American system for years to come, with plans to finalise the reforms process by no later than January.

“The contributions made by the (Inter-American system) are significant, but they still fall short of the region’s needs,” the Bogota Declaration notes. “New challenges to democracy, freedom and human rights continue to emerge; both in terms of new forms of rupture to the Rule of Law and the eruption of violence rooted in organized crime.”

The petition continues: “These facts reaffirm the legitimacy of the Inter-American Court and Commission of Human Rights and the need to improve rather than weaken the system’s efficacy.”

Non-governmental organisations in Mexico are presenting a complaint Friday Nov. 2 before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights about government mistreatment and “social cleansing” of thousands of people living on the street in several of the country’s cities.

Among the cases cited by the plaintiffs are Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, on the U.S. border, where they allege that homeless people and panhandlers are being removed outside the city limits by the police.

The same practice, with variations, is occurring in the western city of Guadalajara, which has an urban planning programme designed to remove the homeless from the centre of the city, and in Mexico City itself, where they are being taken from the historic centre of the city and forced to live under bridges, viaducts or elevated highways, increasing their vulnerability.

Activists say the common denominator of all these actions is the violation of the rights of street people, a sector for which the outgoing Mexican government of conservative President Felipe Calderón lacks specific policies.

The session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “will make the state give an appropriate answer, and will open up a long-term process for human rights violations to be redressed as part of a public agenda,” Juan Martín Pérez, the executive director of the Network for the Rights of Children in Mexico (REDIM), told IPS.

Pérez, whose coalition is made up of 73 child rights advocacy groups, will attend the hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C.

Reliable official statistics on children, young people and adults living or working on the streets of Mexico’s large cities are hard to come by.

For instance, the Institute of Social Assistance and Integration, an agency of the Secretariat of Social Development of Mexico City, recorded 3,467 men and 547 women living on the street last year, based on attendance at their shelters.

But NGOs estimate the number of people on the streets of the Mexican capital at between 15,000 and 30,000. Children, teenagers, adults and the elderly can daily be seen wiping windshields, selling sweets or cigarettes or simply begging.

In spite of several years of economic growth, 52 million of the country’s 112 million people were living in poverty at the end of 2010, according to the latest figures published by the state National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy. Approximately 23 percent of these, or 11.7 million people, were extremely poor.

Mexico City “is a paradigmatic case, because it prides itself on being an avant garde city that respects human rights, but it is characterised by social cleansing,” activist Luis Enrique Hernández, the director of El Caracol, a local NGO, who has worked since 1994 with street people and will be part of the mission to Washington, told IPS.

The Federal District Commission for Human Rights (CDHDF) defined the practice as “the removal of personae non gratae from certain places, without any legal justification, just because they live on the streets.”

REDIM and the Mexican Alliance of Street Populations requested this special hearing by the Commission, which has also invited the ministries of foreign relations and social development, as well as the leftwing government of Mexico City.

At the hearing, the organisations will denounce the living conditions in nine Mexican cities where, they allege, the rights to personal integrity, equality, non-discrimination, freedom from human trafficking, due process and freedom are being violated.

People living on the street often suffer harassment from city government officials or the police to remove them from their places of work or where they sleep, they say.

The CDHDF has received at least 65 complaints of abuse against street people since 2009.

“There have been limited actions and temporary programmes, but they have not made up for the absence of a public policy,” Pérez said.

Activists like Pérez have received threats because of their work, and will also ask the Commission to take special measures to protect them, said Hernández.

The Mexico City government of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, of the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution, is preparing to implement an Information System for Street Populations, that will make it possible to monitor the care afforded these groups, and the Multidisciplinary Care Protocol for First Contact with Street Populations.

But experts criticise the way these programmes have been designed.

“The Protocol is merely palliative. It should have been the product of recognition of the successful efforts of NGOs. And why weren’t the street populations invited to take part as active participants?” asked Alicia Vargas, general director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social Development (CIDES), who will also be attending the hearing.

The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed “concern at the still high number of street children” in Mexico, in its final observations in the 2006 report on Mexico’s compliance with the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It said “insufficient measures” were taken by the government “to prevent this phenomenon and to protect these children,” and recommended the state “undertake regularly comparative studies on the nature and extent of the problem.”

In particular, the Committee, made up of 18 independent experts, regretted “the violence to which (street) children are subjected by the police and others.”

After the hearing, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will analyse the information provided by the parties and issue recommendations for the Mexican state.