For the fourth year running, San Pedro Sula has been one of the most dangerous places on the planet outside of a war zone. Credit: daviditzi/Flickr

By Lisa Haugaard, Sarah Kinosian, and William Hartung
WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb 22 2015 (IPS)

Honduras is one of the most violent nations in the world. The situation in the country’s second largest city, San Pedro Sula, demonstrates the depth of the problem.

For the fourth year running, San Pedro Sula has been one of the most dangerous places on the planet outside of a war zone. Its murder rate in 2014 was an astonishing 171 per 100,000. The city, which is caught in the crossfire between vicious criminal gangs, has been the largest source of the 18,000 Honduran children who have fled to the United States in recent years.

The vast majority of killings in Honduras are carried out with impunity. For example, 97 percent of the murders in San Pedro Sula go unsolved.

Corruption within and abuses by the civilian police undermine its effectiveness. A controversial new internal security force, the Military Police of Public Order (Policia Militar del Orden Publico, or PMOP), does not carry out investigations needed to deter crime and is facing a series of allegations of abuses in the short time it has been deployed. There are currently 3,000 PMOP soldiers deployed throughout the country, but this number is expected to grow to 5,000 this year. The national police feel that the government is starving them for funds and trying to replace them with PMOP."The vast majority of killings in Honduras are carried out with impunity."

The rise of PMOP is part of a larger trend toward the militarization of government and civil society. The military is now in charge of most aspects of public security in Honduras. But the signs of militarization are everywhere. Each Saturday, for example, 25,000 kids receive military training as part of the “Guardians of the Homeland” program, which the government says is designed to keep youths age 5-23 from joining the street gangs that control entire sections of the country’s most violent cities.

But putting more guns on the street is unlikely to sustainably stem the tide of violence in Honduras. What would make a difference is an end to the climate of impunity that allows murderers to kill people with no fear of consequences.

“This country needs to strengthen its capacity and will to carry out criminal investigations. This is the key to everything,” said an expert on violence in Honduras who spent years working in justice agencies there, and who spoke on condition of anonymity for reasons of personal safety.

The Three-Fold Challenge

The Honduran government faces three key challenges: It must reform a corrupt and abusive police force, strengthen criminal investigations, and ensure an impartial and independent judiciary.

Police reform appears to be stalled. There was some hope after the surge of civilian pressure for reform that followed the 2011 killing of the son of the rector for the Autonomous National University of Honduras and a friend. The Commission for the Reform of Public Security produced a series of proposals to improve the safety of the Honduran citizenry, including recommendations for improving police training, disciplinary procedures, and the structure of pubic security institutions.

Unfortunately, the Honduran Congress dissolved the commission in January 2014, during the lame duck period before President Juan Orlando Hernandez took office. Few of its recommendations have been carried out.

“They could have purged and trained the police during this time. But instead they put 5,000 military police on the street who don’t know what a chain of custody is,” lamented the expert on violence.

The Honduran government claims that over 2,000 police officers have been purged since May 2012, but there is little public information that would allow for an independent assessment of the reasons for the dismissals. And even when police are removed, they are not prosecuted; some are even allowed to return to the force. This is no way to instill accountability.

Meanwhile, the independence of the Honduran justice system is under attack. Since November 2013, the Judiciary Council has dismissed 29 judges and suspended 28 without an appropriate process, according to a member of the Association of Judges for Democracy. “This means that judges feel intimidated. They feel if they rule against well-connected people, against politicians, they can be dismissed.”

In an attempt to improve investigations and prosecutions, special units have been created to investigate specific types of crimes. For example, the Special Victims Task Force was created in 2011 to tackle crimes against vulnerable groups such as journalists, human rights advocates, and the LGBT community. This approach has been funded by the United States. It has promise, but the results are unclear so far. So is the question of whether the success of these specialized efforts can lead to broader improvements in the judicial system.

Protecting the Protectors

Providing security for justice operators is a particularly daunting problem. From 2010 to December 2014, 86 legal professionals were killed, according to information received by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Although the state provides some protection, the funding allocated for this purpose is inadequate. “In a country with the highest levels of violence and impunity in the region,” noted the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, “the State necessarily has a special obligation to protect, so that its justice sector operators can carry out their work to fight impunity without becoming victims in the very cases they are investigating.”

To try and target the problems driving the endemic violence in Honduras, the government, joined by the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador, has released its Alliance for Prosperity plan, which is designed to increase investment in infrastructure and encourage foreign investment. The Obama administration has announced that it will ask Congress for $1 billion to help fund the initiative, but details about the security strategy are scarce.

It remains to be seen exactly how this money will be spent. Looking at San Pedro Sula, it is clear that a dramatic change in political will would be needed for any initiative of this kind to be successful. International donors should not support a militarized security strategy, which would intensify abuses and fail to provide sustainable citizen security.

Funding for well-designed, community-based violence prevention programs could be helpful, but only if there is a government willing to reform the police, push for justice, and invest in the education, jobs, violence prevention, health, child protection, and community development programs needed to protect its poorest citizens.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus.

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

Excerpt:

A Huaorani man holding a hunting spear in a tourist lodge in Tigüino, a community in Yasuní National Park in Ecuador's Amazon region. Credit: Eduardo Valenzuela/IPS

By Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Jun 5 2013 (IPS)

Reports of another massacre in an isolated indigenous community in Ecuador’s Amazon region cast doubt on the state’s compliance with precautionary measures imposed in favour of uncontacted peoples in 2006 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

According to reports that are being investigated, some 30 Taromenane Indians were killed by members of the rival Huaorani indigenous community, seven years after the Inter-American Commission (IACHR) called for protection for native peoples in voluntary isolation.

The government claims it is doing everything possible, but civil society organisations dispute that.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the alleged Mar. 29 massacre, first heard of in early May, but the inquiry is still in its preliminary stages.

Cawetipe Yeti, the president of the Huaorani Federation of Ecuador, said 30 Taromenane Indians had been killed, including children, in revenge for an earlier incident in which an elderly couple of his ethnic group had been murdered near the Tiguacuno river in Yasuní National Park. Earlier, a member of the Huaorani who claimed to have led the attack reported a lower number of fatalities.

The Taromenane and Tagaeri indigenous communities are the last uncontacted groups in the northeastern Ecuadorean Amazon basin, having shunned contact with the outside world. They live in the “untouchable zone” of over 700,000 hectares created by the government in 1999 to protect the area from activities that could threaten biodiversity and their cultures.

Their latest clashes with members of native communities in partial contact with the outside world, like the Huaorani, have renewed doubts about the effectiveness of the protective measures and drawn criticism of government actions and the impact of the model of development in an area rich in oil, minerals and timber.

In 2006, the IACHR, part of the Organisation of American States human rights system, called on the Ecuadorean state to “adopt effective measures to protect the lives and personal integrity of the Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples.”

The resolution added that the authorities should take “the measures necessary to protect the territory inhabited by the beneficiaries from third parties.”

To comply with these requirements, one year later Ecuador launched its “Plan to protect the lives of the Tagaeri-Taromenane uncontacted peoples,” as part of a national policy for indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation.

The stated strategy of the plan is “to assure the survival and physical, cultural and territorial integrity of peoples in voluntary isolation.”

The government banned outsiders from entering the protected zones of isolated peoples for purposes other than essential actions for social and environmental protection.

Excepted from this ban are other indigenous people living in the area, like the Huaorani, who number approximately 4,000 compared to 300 Taromenane and 30 Tagaeri.

While native people’s organisations in this country of 14.6 million people claim that 40 percent of the population is indigenous, only seven percent identified themselves as such in the 2010 census.

Under the government strategy, the armed forces may enter the protected zones for national security reasons, and priority attention is to be paid to the Amazon region ecosystems inhabited by communities in voluntary isolation.

After receiving the reports of the recent massacre, the government said that in 2012 a technical team from the Interior Ministry scouted the jungle in the untouchable zone on about 200 occasions, to monitor the possible presence of uncontacted communities.

The goal of the patrols is “to establish protection plans, as well as actions to avoid contact with settlers from outside or westernised native groups,” the government explained. The team has been carrying out the policy on behalf of voluntarily isolated peoples since 2010.

The government also said visits were made to several non-isolated indigenous communities to collect information about possible sightings of any signs of the protected peoples.

But civil society organisations regard these efforts as inadequate and say that if the protection measures had been more effective, the incidents of violence might have been avoided.

For example, former legislator María Paula Romo said “To regard this as a question of conflicts between ethnic groups or clans is an unacceptable way for (the government) to disassociate itself from its responsibility for what is happening.”

In her view, in addition to the need for concrete action on this conflict, “the fundamental issue should be an honest, thorough review of the model of development in the Amazon region.”

Humberto Cholango, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), agrees. “The conflict cannot be reduced to a confrontation between fraternal peoples,” as that would be to “wilfully adopt a political misreading of the issue,” he told IPS.

“Many have an interest in showing the world that this is ‘a problem between Indians’ rather than what it actually is: the result of an extractive industries policy that has increased the pressure on indigenous peoples. This is a national problem,” said Cholango, leader of the largest Ecuadorean indigenous organisation.

He said that imposition of the model has caused voluntarily isolated peoples to lose their way of life and their habitat, including their food and animals, which compels them to resort to violence, even among themselves, as a defence.

In contrast, Juan Sebastián Medina, the head of the Interior Ministry’s Precautionary Measures Plan, believes that the conflict “cannot be understood as a form of political pressure, nor as a form of pressure from the lumber or fossil fuel industries.

“It has to be understood from the perspective of a world view,” he said in public statements.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said on May 26 that the problem is “extremely complex.” He referred to the request by the United Nations 10 days earlier for the conflict between Amazonian indigenous peoples to be brought to an end.

“The U.N. has just told the Ecuadorean government it must protect the lives of the uncontacted peoples. Great! I’d like them to tell us how,” he said. “It’s very difficult to protect the lives of uncontacted people without contacting them.”

A group of anthropologists sent 16 recommendations to the authorities on May 29, calling for real solutions.

One of the first was for “the state to carry out an in-depth investigation to determine and achieve a comprehensive understanding of the internal factors affecting the Huaorani people, the relationship between the Huaorani and the Taromenane, and other isolated families or groups.”

The anthropologists also proposed that the state include in its analysis factors arising from the political economy of the Amazon region, such as “the extractive model of development linked to fossil fuel exploitation.”

Like CONAIE and organisations working for the rights of indigenous peoples, the anthropologists regard it as “inappropriate to reduce the conflict solely to the confrontation between the Huaorani and Taromenane peoples, while neglecting an analysis of the historical, economic and political circumstances that have exacerbated internal tensions.”

President Correa, meanwhile, said there would be an inquiry into possible omissions and violations on the part of the authorities in their responsibilities for protecting uncontacted peoples. The government is also looking into the possibility of creating a body to be directly in charge of the interests of communities remaining in voluntary isolation.

A Huaorani man armed with traditional spears and his wife and children welcome a group of tourists to the community of Tigüino, located within Yasuní National Park. Credit: Eduardo Valenzuela/IPS

By Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, May 2 2013 (IPS)

The Constitution of Ecuador adopted in 2008 establishes a broad range of rights for indigenous peoples and nationalities, including the right to prior consultation, which gives them the opportunity to influence decisions that affect their lives.

But this right has yet to be fully translated into legislation, as the bill for a Law on Consultation with Indigenous Communities, Peoples and Nationalities is still being studied by the National Assembly.

Article 57, section 7 of the constitution guarantees “free, prior and informed consultation, within a reasonable period of time, on plans and programmes for exploration, exploitation and sale of non-renewable resources located on their lands which could have environmental or cultural impacts on them.”

The constitution also stipulates the right of indigenous peoples “to share in the profits earned from these projects and to receive compensation for social, cultural and environmental damages caused to them. The consultation that must be conducted by the competent authorities shall be mandatory and timely.”

“If the consent of the consulted community is not obtained, steps provided for by the Constitution and the law shall be taken,” it adds.

Legal grounds for consultation are also established in Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which Ecuador ratified in 1998, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007.

Nevertheless, recent mining and oil drilling projects have put the government’s commitment to respecting the right to consultation to the test, and spurred indigenous organisations to take action.

On Nov. 28, 2012, hundreds of indigenous representatives converged in Quito to protest the lack of consultation prior to the 11th oil auction round, in which exploration blocks containing an estimated total of 1.6 billion barrels of crude oil would be put up for bids from private companies.

At the time, Domingo Peas, a leader of the Achuar indigenous ethnic group, declared that “the government says it has carried out prior consultation, but this is not true.”

“The consultations carried out among the peoples and nationalities in the areas of influence are invalid, because there was no participation by indigenous peoples and nationalities in determining the way they were conducted, they did not respect their traditional methods of decision-making, and cultural aspects, such as language, were not adequately taken into account,” he stressed.

Overall, said Peas, the consultations “were neither prior, nor free, nor informed, and were conducted in bad faith.”

The president of the influential Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), Humberto Cholango, believes that the authorities have not done enough.

“Prior consultation is still pending, we have still not seen the results we would like to see. We need the law to be approved; that would be a major advance,” he told Tierramérica*.

The draft law, comprising 29 articles, refers to consultation on legislative measures and establishes four stages: preparation; a public call for participation and registration; the actual holding of the consultation; and analysis of the results and conclusion.

In accordance with the law, the government will determine if a proposed bill affects the rights of certain communities, in which case the National Assembly will convene a prior consultation that will be conducted through the National Electoral Council.

Lourdes Tibán, an indigenous National Assembly member from the leftist opposition movement Pachakutik, told Tierramérica that adoption of this law is crucial, because “it will guarantee the participation of indigenous nationalities in decisions on future laws that directly affect them, and will therefore prevent a lack of consensus.”

Once this legislation is in force, other major bills can be addressed, such as the proposed law on water resources, on which debate has been postponed since 2010 precisely due to the resistance posed by indigenous peoples. One of their key concerns is that the proposals made during a prior consultation process will not be included in the final text of the law that was submitted to consultation.

A number of other bills, such as those for laws on culture and land, are also on hold for the same reason.

This is the heart of the conflict.

One year ago, President Rafael Correa stated in one of his regular Saturday broadcasts that non-governmental organisations “want prior consultations to be popular consultations and to be binding; that means that for every step we want to take, we will need to ask the community for permission.”

“This is extremely serious. This is not what the international agreements say. This would not mean acting in the interests of the majorities, but rather in the interest of unanimity. It would be impossible to govern that way,” he declared.

In response to these statements, indigenous organisations sought reinforcement, calling on agencies such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the ILO to supervise the implementation of prior consultation.

In fact, indigenous communities in Ecuador have already turned to some of these mechanisms in the past. In 2003, the Quechua community of Sarayaku filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the state for authorising oil exploration in their territory, without prior consultation.

The community, located in the province of Pastaza, in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest region, denounced damages to their territory, culture and economy. In June 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of the community and against the state.

The government is still studying how to pay the required compensation – a total of 1,398,000 dollars for material and moral damages and legal costs – and how to finish repairing the physical damage caused.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Ecuador’s attempt to introduce institutional changes in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has been frustrated for now. Quito is seeking allies to create parallel regional mechanisms, but the risks of losing at this game are high, according to experts and users of the regional justice system.

The proposal that Ecuador took to the 44th Extraordinary General Assembly of the Organisation of American States (OAS) focused on three aspects: limiting the IACHR’s power to impose precautionary measures, debating the financing of the Special Rapporteurship on Freedom of Expression, and changing the IACHR’s headquarters from Washington to a city in Latin America.

Because of the lack of support for its proposal, Ecuador threatened to withdraw from the Inter-American system of human rights. But in the end, an alternative solution put forward by Argentina caused the Ecuadorean government to back down.

The debate on reforming the IACHR remains open, and that is “a victory,” according to Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño. But he stated emphatically that one of the main goals of his government is to create a human rights system within the framework of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) or the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

“We have proposed building a South American human rights system,” he said on his return from the OAS meeting, held Mar. 22. There were “several meetings and we are very close to reaching an agreement,” he said.

But while waiting for this proposal to crystallise, Ecuador is hoping for further progress in the forthcoming OAS meeting in June.

The inter-American system for the protection of human rights is made up of two autonomous organs: the Washington-based IACHR, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in San José, Costa Rica.

Their main function is to oversee compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1969.

There are voices in Ecuador who say that in some cases, the inter-American system has achieved results that the national justice system has not.

Harold Burbano, a legal adviser with the Regional Human Rights Advisory Foundation (INREDH), says “80 percent of the 25 cases we have litigated are in the inter-American system, which shows that (Ecuadorean) justice has been ineffective,” he told IPS.

Several cases did not reach the Inter-American Court because the state “accepted friendly settlements,” he acknowledged.

Burbano clarified that most of the cases are at the investigation stage, awaiting “a report with recommendations to the state in order to avoid being taken by the IACHR to the Inter-American Court.”

The IACHR’s political powers include carrying out on-site visits and issuing recommendations and reports. It also has quasi-judicial functions: receiving complaints, determining their admissibility, requesting precautionary measures by states and taking cases to the Inter-American Court.

The Court adjudicates cases referred to it, issues opinions on legal matters and adopts provisional measures for the protection of persons or groups. Its rulings are binding and are not subject to appeal.

According to the Attorney General’s Office, the IACHR took on 83 Ecuadorean cases and issued 12 friendly settlements, while another 12 cases have been referred to the Court.

An emblematic case involved the indigenous Quechua people of Sarayaku, who in 2003 filed a complaint against the state to the IACHR for oil industry actions that threatened human rights within their territory.

In June 2012 the Court issued a sentence condemning the Ecuadorean state. But the government has not yet paid reparations, and it has not complied with the requirement of previously consulting indigenous communities about economic activity in their territories.

The reforms of the IACHR spearheaded by Ecuador would have affected the independence and effective capacity of the Commission to promote and defend human rights in the region, Xavier Buendía, the president of the Centro de Observación Ciudadana (Citizens’ Observatory), told IPS.

Buendía concurred with one of the things Quito emphasises: the need for the IACHR to improve actions to promote human rights.

“In addition to prevention, it should increase the levels of awareness, information and empowerment, and foment more activism among both the public authorities and society as a whole,” he said.

According to Buendía, “a major problem is that there are no deadlines for the Court’s rulings.”

However, in his view, it is “rather strange” to attempt to create a human rights system at the heart of UNASUR, as “this means creating a logical counterweight to the inter-American system.”

A parallel justice system “is not that easy to create,” and the idea is more likely to be “an escape clause” for Ecuador, Burbano said. “The Commission and the Court have been fundamental underpinnings for human rights in the region.”

From a different point of view, the legal adviser for the Ecumenical Commission on Human Rights, César Duque, said “the government’s proposals are intended to strengthen” the IACHR.

But on the other hand, “they could lead to its weakening, when it comes to restricting the IACHR’s capacity to dictate precautionary measures and to raise funds to carry out the full extent of its mission,” Duque told IPS.

Now the countries in the region are awaiting the outcome, but “most states are not interested in reforming, but rather in strengthening, the IACHR; none of them have spoken of changing its competencies,” he said.

The state of Ecuador itself has used the system. In 2011 it requested, and obtained, from the IACHR precautionary measures to prevent the execution of Nelson Serrano, an Ecuadorean man sentenced to death in the United States.

And in 2010, for the first time since it was created, the IACHR accepted a lawsuit against another state, when Ecuador accused Colombia of killing Ecuadorean citizen Franklin Aisalla during Colombia’s bombing of a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) camp located within Ecuadorean territory.

Duque does not think Ecuador will really pull out of the system; this is a “last ditch effort” that will get it nowhere, he said.

It’s a strategy to exert pressure, in the face of possible rulings on the violation of free expression in the current confrontation between the government and the media, he said. “The state is on the defensive because it sees the media as political actors opposed to the administration.”

Mexico has been a prominent defender of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the battle being waged by some members of the Organisation of American States to curb its authority.

What is paradoxical, according to human rights defenders, is that Mexico’s strong support for the IACHR actually endangers to some extent access by victims of human rights abuses in Mexico to this last resort for justice.

“Mexico has backed the work of the (inter-American human rights) system and in its discourse it presents itself as a defender of human rights. It even managed to place representatives in the system,” human rights lawyer Simón Hernández told IPS.

“The risk is that this can translate into a degree of political control over decisions against the Mexican state,” said Hernández, an activist with the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Centre.

The human rights group has presented petitions to the IACHR in cases like the Pasta de Conchos coal mine disaster, where 65 miners were buried after a methane explosion in 2006 in the northern state of Coahuila, or the women raped that same year in San Salvador Atenco during a police crackdown on protests.

The problem, Hernández said, is that “in international forums, Mexico’s position has always been marked by an enormous contradiction between its rhetoric and reality.”

David Peña with the National Association of Democratic Lawyers said “Mexico’s foreign policy has been characterised by accepting everything, supporting everything – but domestically, the situation is different.”

Peña is one of the lawyers who brought the case of eight women killed in 2001 in the northern border city of Ciudad Juárez, known as the “cotton field” case for the name of the waste ground where their bodies were found, to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

In November 2009, the Court found the Mexican state guilty of denial of justice in relation to three of the murders.

Three years later, Mexico asked the Court to declare that it had complied with the sentence, even though the femicides (gender-related murders) and disappearances of women not only continued but had spread to the rest of the country, as part of the wave of violence that has swept Mexico since 2006.

And the map of femicide hotspots includes the central state of Mexico where San Salvador Atenco is located – and which was governed by current President Enrique Peña Nieto from 2005 to 2011.

“Mexico has supported the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,” said human rights lawyer Peña. “It was one of the countries that proposed closing down the discussion (of the reforms) and I hope that position will win out. But we don’t know what repercussions that support will have (on denunciations against the Mexican state).”

The regional human rights system – made up of the Washington-based Inter-American Commission and the San Jose, Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights – oversees compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights.

The IACHR has eight thematic rapporteurships, the most dynamic of which is the special rapporteurship on freedom of expression, which receives nearly one million dollars a year in external financing.

The regional human rights system is appreciated by human rights defenders but not governments. Since June 2011, states affected by its resolutions, including Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, have been pressing for reforms to curtail its reach.

And in May 2012, the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States, José Miguel Insulza of Chile, himself questioned the system, stating in an interview that “if you look at the statistics by country, most of the countries that have the most cases (before the IACHR and the Court) are not the ones where the largest number of abuses are committed, but are where the non-governmental organisations know how to use the system.”

The debate is focused on the IACHR’s power to issue binding precautionary measures; the singling out of countries considered “problematic” – like Cuba, Colombia, Honduras and Venezuela – in its annual report on human rights; and the operation and financing sources of the special rapporteurships.

The criticism is that one-third of the IACHR’s budget comes from the European Union, the United States and Canada, even though the last two have refused to ratify the American Convention on Human Rights, which forms the basis of the system.

In the special OAS meeting held Friday Mar. 22 to discuss the reforms, Mexico defended the need for states to be reliable in meeting their payments to the system, and announced an extraordinary 300,000 dollar contribution.

“It is time for the states to give all of their support to the Commission,” said Mexican foreign minister José Antonio Meade.

The legal experts who spoke to IPS said it was necessary to strengthen the inter-American system.

But one of them added that, compared to “the level of violations” committed in Mexico, very few cases are accepted by the IACHR. There are even cases, like that of San Salvador Atenco, in which there had been “certain delays” by the Commission when it came to carrying out an in-depth investigation, the source said.

Nor is Mexico included in the annual report singling out countries with human rights problems, even though as many as 98 percent of all crimes go unpunished in this country, according to NGOs.

On Mar. 14, the IACHR held a marathon session of hearings related to abuses by the Mexican state.

Two of them involved the leftwing government of Mexico City, one for the public exhibition of detainees and another for the refusal to accept evidence running counter to the sentence that found that activist Digna Ochoa’s 2001 death was the result of suicide rather than homicide.

In another case, the women raped in San Salvador Atenco rejected the apology they were given by representatives of President Peña Nieto.

Two other hearings involved public policies, such as the concentration of authority over the police forces in the interior ministry, and the inoperativeness of the government’s Mechanism of Protection for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists.

Since 2006, 61 activists and more than 50 reporters have been killed and at least 15 have gone missing in Mexico.

In the latest hearing, representatives of the Rarámuri and Tepehuán indigenous communities complained that the authorities did not consult them on the construction of a tourism project in the northern state of Chihuahua.

Native people protesting against the Belo Monte dam, a project that created a rift between Brazil and the IACHR. Credit: Atossa Soltani

By Clarinha Glock
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil , Mar 1 2013 (IPS)

March will be a key month for defining the future of the Inter-American human rights system, which has come under fire from a number of countries in the region.

Mar. 22 is the deadline for members of the Organisation of American States (OAS) to present proposals for reforming the regional justice system created in 1948 with the purpose of promoting and protecting the basic rights enshrined in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The system is made up of two autonomous bodies: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), based in Washington, D.C., and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in San José, Costa Rica.

Its main function is to oversee compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1969.

The government of Ecuador made the first reform proposal, and is also leading an effort to create a parallel system of justice in the framework of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which has, however, not yet materialised.

Venezuela, for its part, denounced the American Convention in September 2012, and is set to withdraw from the inter-American justice system in September 2013.

The debate on reforms was launched in June 2011 with the creation of a working group within the OAS. Since then forums, public hearings and on-line consultations have been held to study different recommendations.

The chief proposals would restrict the IACHR’s power to impose precautionary measures (the adoption of urgent measures to protect individuals or groups from irreparable harm), curtail detailed analysis of countries with mass human rights abuses and limit the powers of the special rapporteurs, such as the rapporteur for freedom of expression.

The Commission has political functions – carrying out specific visits and issuing recommendations and reports – and quasi judicial ones: receiving complaints from organisations or private individuals, determining whether they are admissible, requesting precautionary measures by the relevant states and taking cases to the Inter-American Court.

The Court’s functions are litigation, consultation and the adoption of precautionary measures. Its rulings are final and are not subject to appeal.

Brazil’s relations with the Commission soured in April 2011, when the IACHR called, as a precautionary measure, for the immediate suspension of the permit for the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam on the Xingú river in the Amazon rainforest, to protect the health of native communities affected by the works.

The Brazilian government rejected the request. But the Brazilian position was misinterpreted, according to the Foreign Ministry’s human rights division, which instructed a representative to reply to IPS’s enquiries on condition of anonymity.

Brazil was already in the process of meeting the Commission’s demands, in response to requests from national oversight agencies, and the country’s support for reform of the IACHR was not triggered by the ruling, the diplomatic source said.

In any event, the Brazilian government withdrew its ambassador from the OAS, as well as its candidate to sit on the IAHCR board of officers. March is the deadline for countries to nominate candidates and, according to the Foreign Ministry’s human rights division, by mid-February no decision had been taken by Brazil in this respect.

“Proposals for reform are being presented just when the Commission and the Court are complying with their obligations under the Convention,” said activist Jair Krischke, the head of the Movement for Justice and Human Rights (MJDH), based in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

According to Krischke, the stance taken by Brazil was not only prompted by the ruling on Belo Monte, but also by a 2010 Inter-American Court verdict ordering the handing over of the remains of people who were forcibly disappeared in the 1972-1975 military action against the Araguaia guerrillas and the payment of reparations to the victims’ families.

The government maintains it has already paid compensation, but it has not done so for moral damages, as the Court ordered, Krischke told IPS.

When a similar verdict was issued against Uruguay, “the government held a ceremony in parliament, attended by the president, and apologised for the forced disappearances (committed during the 1973-1985 dictatorship). Brazil did not even publish the Court sentence,” he said.

Government discontent with the Inter-American human rights system is incomprehensible, said associate professor Deisy de Freitas Lima Ventura, of the University of São Paulo’s Institute of International Relations.

“When a sovereign state forms part of a regional system, it is precisely in order to hear criticism and receive recommendations or condemnations,” she told IPS.

The governments of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela are active in this campaign because the inter-American justice system has touched on crucial aspects of their presidents’ agendas, de Freitas said.

“When the Inter-American system accepts an opposition politician in Venezuela as a candidate, or when it asks for respect for the rights of journalists of a newspaper in conflict with the president of Ecuador, it touches on issues that are personal for the presidents. That is also what happened with Belo Monte and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff,” she said.

The stance taken by Ecuador coincides with uncomfortable decisions about domestic questions, said Mario Melo, a professor of human rights at the Simón Bolívar Andean University and the lawyer representing the Sarayaku people versus the Ecuadorean state in their case before the Court.

In June 2012, the Court ruled that the government of Ecuador had violated the rights of this native community by failing to consult them about the encroachment of an oil company on their lands in the early 2000s.

“It’s a delicate issue for the government because of its policy of expanding the oil frontier in indigenous territories,” Melo said.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, the Commission has been a forum for victims of abuses who have exhausted domestic legal remedies, or who find themselves facing unjustified delays in the national judicial system.

Camila Asano, the foreign policy coordinator for Conectas Direitos Humanos, an NGO with consultative status at the United Nations, recalled that crucial issues in Brazil, like slave labour and gender-based violence, had to be addressed by the IACHR before they became visible.

But the legal process is slow – one of the criticisms levelled at the inter-American justice system. Sometimes there is no time to wait for a decision, and that is why the precautionary measures are needed, Asano said.

Ecuador wants to eliminate the Commission’s power to impose precautionary measures, leaving that authority to the Court.

Brazil – where the Commission has repeatedly ordered precautionary measures to protect activists, journalists, landless rural workers and prison inmates – recognises the competence of the Commission, but has suggested changes that would make the procedures more rigorous and complicated.

The Brazilian proposal, according to the Foreign Ministry’s representative, is that the Commission should sharpen up the arguments justifying its decisions in cases like Belo Monte, and put more emphasis on the promotion of human rights.

“They should not only judge and punish violations, but rather develop measures that prevent them from being committed again,” the source said.

Other criticism is more worrisome, such as questions about whether the Commission is competent to produce annual reports on countries that merit special attention. Country delegates allege that these reports should not single out specific states, but should focus on all the members of the OAS system.

The fact that the United States and Canada have not ratified the American Convention, yet contribute to funding the special rapporteur on freedom of expression, has also annoyed a number of countries.

One of the proposals is that donations should not be earmarked for a particular rapporteurship.

Brazil is calling for more transparent management, and for resources to be distributed from the OAS ordinary fund, without excluding the possibility of receiving donations from international foundations and development banks.

“A large proportion of the proposed improvements have not been implemented because of a lack of resources,” said Asano. Her human rights group considers that, as an economic powerhouse, Brazil should set an example and increase its contributions.

According to the diplomatic source, this country made its last contribution in 2008. “In 2010, management of funds was redirected from Itamaraty (the Foreign Ministry) to the Planning Ministry. This year we asked for 800,000 dollars, but the request was not approved due to a budgetary shortfall,” the source said.

“In the last few years we have tightened our belts when it comes to expenditure, and no contributions were made. I wouldn’t say it was for political reasons; perhaps there really was no money,” the source added.

Professor Melo believes that after the discussions are over, the most radical reforms will not be approved. “Everyone knows that weakening the Inter-American system would only strengthen the authoritarian use of power,” he said.

In de Freitas’s view, “to renounce this dimension of control, as Venezuela did, is to mortgage future generations. Obviously, a regional rights protection system does not solve the problems, but in many cases it can shed light on the abuses.”