WANTED: A NEW WORLD CHAMPION
Clive Stafford Smith
New Statesman
December 18, 2006
How can the US condemn torture in Argentina, political murders in
Russia and censorship in North Korea when it promotes "kangaroo courts"
at Guantanamo Bay?
Despite various bright moments in the past year, the cause of human
rights continued to be undercut by the very countries that should be
leading the way. It is difficult for a human-rights violator to be
an effective advocate for human rights and human decency.
Bringing the perpetrators of international crimes to justice is an
important step along the path towards civilisation. By resisting any
international trial of US personnel, no matter what the crime, and
by promoting what the British former law lord Lord Steyn described as
"kangaroo courts" in Guantanamo Bay, the Bush administration continues
to act as a dead weight in this area.
None the less, 2006 has brought some notable milestones. Charles Taylor
is the former Liberian president charged with ordering hundreds of
rapes that started on Valentine’s Day 1998, continuing until the end of
June. His trial was moved from Sierra Leone to The Hague, with Britain
promising a prison cell if he is convicted. In November, the case
began against Momcilo Mandic, justice minister in the Bosnian-Serb
government of Radovan Karadzic. Wire-tap evidence will be used to
prove his role in guards’ torture of inmates in three prisons.
The prosecution of war crimes has thoroughly infiltrated domestic
law as well. The French are seeking to prosecute President Paul
Kagame of Rwanda for the 1994 killing of the then Rwandan president,
Juvenal Habyarimana, when his plane was shot down. The murder sparked
violence that led to 800,000 deaths; the French claim jurisdiction
because the plane’s crew was from France. Prosecutors have authorised
arrest warrants for nine senior Rwandan officials. Similarly,
in November, Canada ordered the trial of Desire Munyaneza for his
alleged participation in the genocide.
Meanwhile, the pardons issued in favour of various Argentinian junta
leaders were ruled unconstitutional by a federal court in Buenos
Aires, leaving them open to prosecution for various crimes, including
kidnapping up to 30,000 people who "disappeared" during the late
1970s. And Spain ordered the arrest of the former Argentinian police
officer Ricardo Taddei for the torture and murder of 160 left-wing
"dissidents" at secret detention centres.
As prosecutions of officials become more frequent, there are signs that
the punishment of less exalted criminals is becoming more humane. In
April, the president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo,
commuted the sentences of all 1,230 prisoners on death row to life
imprisonment. In Vietnam, a proposal would end executions for several
non-violent offences. That said, Le Manh Luong, a British national, was
sentenced to death in Vietnam just two weeks ago, on 25 November. In
the same month, another British citizen on death row, Mirza Tahir
Hussain, was freed by President Pervez Musharraf after 18 years in
prison, his liberation due largely to the personal intervention of
Prince Charles, then on a state visit to Pakistan.
The trend away from the death penalty has reached the US, where,
this past year, the number of such sentences imposed has been well
under half the figure ten years ago.
Free speech, however, is a human right that is all too often ignored.
The worldwide record has not been good in 2006. President George
Bush protested that his suggestion to Tony Blair that they should
bomb al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar was a "joke". Most people
failed to see the humour, including Sami al-Hajj, a journalist
for al-Jazeera, who on 15 December celebrated his fifth year in US
custody at Guantanamo Bay. In all that time, no charges have been
laid against him.
The Bush administration has been setting a bad example to some
unsavoury regimes. According to Reporters Without Borders, North
Korea, one of the members of the "axis of evil", is bottom of the
press freedom league table. Turkmenistan comes a close second: each
news bulletin there begins with a pledge that the broadcaster’s
tongue will shrivel if he slanders the country, the flag, or the
president. Such discord is unlikely, as President Saparmurat Niyazov
personally appoints journalists.
Various close allies of the west are not doing much better. The 59th
World Newspaper Congress was held in Moscow in June. Four months later,
the leading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a powerful critic
of President Vladimir Putin’s Chechen policy, was murdered.
Her killers have not yet been identified, despite video footage of them
entering her apartment building. The following month, there was much
less media coverage of a five-year sentence for Boris Stomakhin on a
charge of "inciting ethnic hatred" with his coverage of the Chechen
conflict. His crime was to describe the Russian presence in Chechnya
as an "occupation" and to compare Putin with Saddam Hussein.
It has also been a dangerous year to be a journalist in the
Philippines, where at least eight people working to expose corruption
have been killed. Although 60 journalists have been murdered there
in the past ten years, a trial of three men in October for the murder
of the journalist Marlene Esperat led to only the fourth conviction.
Meanwhile, Jose Miguel Arroyo, the husband of the president, has
brought 43 separate actions against journalists for libel; they have
now clubbed together in a class action to sue him for seeking to
"chill the freedom of the press".
But there have also been positive developments on free speech,
particularly where the European Union has brought pressure to bear
on new members, and countries aspiring to membership. The most famous
example came in October when the EU harshly condemned the prosecution
of the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, for "denigrating Turkishness"
by describing the genocide of Armenians during the Great War.
The prospect of entry into the EU also encouraged free speech in
Bulgaria, where Georgi Koritarov, a respected journalist, admitted to
acting as a spy during the country’s communist era and apologised for
his actions on television. His name had been officially released by
the interior minister as part of a Freedom of Information action. FOI
has become big news in Bulgaria, where the ministry of agriculture
and forestry was given a sardonic "Golden Padlock" award for refusing
to answer requests for information about corrupt sales of coastal
property to private individuals – including a growing number of UK
citizens. Romania faces similar challenges in joining the EU, and
has set up an "Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes".
Meanwhile, the struggle against discrimination on the basis of
gender and sexual orientation has oscillated this year. Much is
made in the western media of the alleged chauvinism of Islam; yet,
on the other side of that coin, the first 50 women were appointed as
state religious preachers in Morocco in May, in a government drive
to promote a more tolerant version of Islam. Four months earlier,
in Sudan, two female judges were elected to the new African Court on
Human and Peoples’ Rights.
Meanwhile, as the US Supreme Court debates whether to roll back the
constitutional right to abortion, the trend towards criminalising
all abortions in central America continues, with the Nicaraguan
government passing restrictive legislation in October. The new law
penalises abortion even when it is carried out to save the pregnant
woman’s life, or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Gay rights suffered a similar setback in Uganda, where a conviction
for sodomy carries the penalty of life imprisonment. In September,
a local tabloid began to publish the names of alleged homosexuals in
a development that could provoke the government to crack down.
Sadly, the focus of human rights to date has by necessity been on
the prevention of oppression. Yet we must not forget the words of
the US Declaration of Independence, which champions "the pursuit
of happiness". Although most people in Britain probably could not
find Bhutan on a map, the Himalayan country has made its priority
the "gross national happiness", rather than the conventional gross
national product.
In 2007, politicians, the media and advocates alike would do well to
remember that human happiness is the most significant right of all,
a view recognised in Bhutan, if not in Britain.
<em>Clive Stafford Smith is the legal director of Reprieve, a UK
charity fighting for the lives of people facing the death penalty and
other human-rights violations. He writes this column monthly. Contact
Reprieve at PO Box 52742, London EC4P 4WS. Tel: 020 7353 4640.
;/em>