http://youtu.be/UtLxXU0Gotk
Today is the 10th World Day Against the Death Penalty, an annual October 10 event created by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty of which Amnesty International is a founding member. Since that first World Day on Oct. 10, 2003, executions are on the wane both here in the U.S. and around the world.
Here are 10 reasons to celebrate 10 years of progress this World Day:
You may not have been aware of it, but this past Wednesday, Aug. 19, was the first World Humanitarian Day. August 19 was designated by the U.N. General Assembly last December as a day each year to honor aid workers around the world, especially those who have given their lives in the line of duty.
The UN website about the World Humanitarian Day noted that in Sri Lanka, 17 staff of the French aid agency Action contre la Faim (ACF) (Action Against Hunger) were killed in August 2006. While the Sri Lankan government has blamed the opposition Tamil Tigers for the killings, a recent report by the Sri Lankan human rights group, University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), provides evidence pointing to the security forces as the killers. And Amnesty International’s report, “Twenty Years of Make-Believe: Sri Lanka’s Commissions of Inquiry, details serious deficiencies of subsequent government investigations into the massacre.
It’s been more than 3 years, and still the killers of the 17 ACF staff have not been brought to justice. One more example of the continuing impunity enjoyed by the Sri Lankan security forces. I hope that by next year’s World Humanitarian Day, I won’t be able to make the same statement.
Yesterday, the U.N. General Assembly marked Human Rights Day by unanimously adopting the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (OP-ICESCR). This historic step fills in a crucial gap in the human rights framework; former High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has described the OP-ICESCR as making human rights whole.
But to the media this looks like U.N. inside baseball, and they haven’t so much as mentioned it. (ReliefWeb, a U.N. humanitarian information portal, covered it; and here’s AI’s press release.)
So what’s it all about? In a word, it provides a means for redress for violations of economic, social and cultural rights.
One way of dividing up human rights obligations is like this:
The Counter Terror With Justice campaign’s call to the Obama administration in its first 100 days is a good illustration:
That is, the call is to stop (close Guantanamo), prevent (ban torture), and begin to redress (set up an independent commission) human rights violations committed by the U.S. government in the “war on terror”. (You should, of course, sign the 100 days petition!)
Anyone who’s suffered a violation of his or her civil and political rights — like freedom of expression, freedom from torture, and the right to a fair trial — can file for redress with the United Nations. This is a matter of international law, and it empowers people in countries whose domestic courts won’t recognize their civil and political rights. That mechanism was established by the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1966.
But there’s never been an analogous system for economic, social and cultural rights — until yesterday. The OP-ICESCR finally provides a means for redress, under international law, for violations of the rights to water, food, health, housing, education and decent work.
This is a new tool for justice for refugees forcibly returned to North Korea and punished by starvation; for Roma children systematically segregated in Slovakia’s schools; and for poor families forcibly evicted from their homes in Angola to make way for new development projects.
Or, in other words:
For more, see the OP-ICESCR Coalition (which included AI).