CHRI Celebrates its 20th Anniversary

This year, 2007, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative celebrates its 20th anniversary. It is now the second largest Commonwealth agency in termsof staffing, after the intergovernmental Commonwealth Secretariat, and has offices in New Delhi, Accra and London. Yet anger that the Commonwealth does not do more for the rights of its citizens, which brought the CHRI into embryonic existence in 1987, is still a driving force for its supporters. And, in spite of gains, it is hard to say that there has been massive progress.

On 14 September, in London, the CHRI will hold a conference which will be more about looking forward than looking back. Don McKinnon, Commonwealth Secretary-General, will look at developments since 2000, and the agenda will cover compliance of member states with international instruments, the relationship between NGOs and national human rights commissions, and the impact of anti-terror laws in restricting liberty. Above all, in the run-up to a Commonwealth summit and election of McKinnon’s successor in Kampala, the participants will be asking “Where is the Commonwealth going for human rights?”

That was also the question that people were asking in 1987, when three NGOs – the Commonwealth Journalists Association, Commonwealth Lawyers Association and Commonwealth Trade Union Council – came together to call for a new initiative by the Commonwealth. The background was severe friction between the Thatcher government in the UK and the bulk of Commonwealth states over sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Human rights advocates were worried that the situation in many countries with one-party states, military dictatorships and liberties trampled underfoot, was a gift to the apartheid regime. The positive Commonwealth merits of shared parliamentary, legal and administrative systems were not being harnessed for rights.

The call was brushed aside by the Vancouver summit in 1987 so the three NGOs, then joined by the Commonwealth Medical Association and Commonwealth Legal Education Association, decided to launch their own non-governmental initiative anyway. Again the next leap forward for the Commonwealth, and the CHRI, was stimulated by dissatisfaction.

In 1991, at the famous Harare summit, the Commonwealth leaders adopted a declaration which among other things urged just and accountable government, the rule of law, and fundamental human rights. But this was far short of what the CHRI, of which I was then director, had called for in its survey report, “Put our world to rights”. The CHRI, then more of a network than an organisation, had wanted the leaders to issue a specific human rights declaration, to set up an intergovernmental Human Rights Commission, and to establish a fund to promote the rights of citizens.

So it was a sense of failure – shared by many human rights advocates who were in Harare then — that caused the CHRI to become permanent. The supporting bodies created a proper constitution, moved the office from London to New Delhi, and recognised that the CHRI would henceforth be a separate Commonwealth campaigning organisation, though continuing to work with others.

One of its first achievements, by the way, was to demand implementation of the Harare Declaration. A fact-finding group which visited Nigeria in 1995, whose report was titled “Nigeria – stolen by generals”, headed each section with a Harare quotation belied by abuses on the ground. When the Nigerian dictatorship and two other military governments were suspended from the Commonwealth at Auckland later that year, and a rules committee was set up {the Commonwealth Ministerial Action  Group (CMAG)} the Harare Declaration was officially rebranded as a foundation document for human rights!  

The CHRI, with an inspirational director in Maja Daruwala, and a distinguished international Advisory Commission now chaired by Sam Okudzeto, has achieved much: advocacy documents every two years prior to a summit, practical work on improved policing and the right to information, an electronic Commonwealth Human Rights Network and a Human Rights Forum every two years to enable NGOs to share ideas.

But, with the genocides in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia and the bitter backlash of the “war on terror” eroding much of the human rights optimism of the early 1990s, there is still much to fight for. The voice of the official Commonwealth is muted, and modest contributions by CMAG or in police training, are little known to citizens. If the Commonwealth, with all its layers of contact and practice, its advantages of a common language and history, cannot push forward the human rights of its peoples – what is it good for in the 21st century?  

(The writer coordinated the voluntary CHRI from 1987, and was its first director, in London, in 1990-92)