inside the glass house

Name and shame: The no-show game
NEW YORK - Every year, the United States and the European Union have religiously played a political game called "name and shame". The world's human rights violators -- almost always in the developing world -- have been singled out by name and publicly shamed at the UN General Assembly.

A series of country-specific resolutions -- condemning human rights abuses in Iran, Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo -- were routinely adopted at the annual sessions of the General Assembly.

On the face of it, the noble exercise was apparently meant to warn human rights violators that they risked being singled out for public condemnation if they did not put their houses in order.

The trouble with this one-sided highly-politicised game was the "holier-than-thou" attitude taken by the US and Western European nations who believed they were far beyond reprimand -- particularly in the field of human rights.

But last week there was an open revolt against the US and European Union who were publicly castigated for their double standards. Firstly, Belarus dared to challenge the US by introducing a draft resolution condemning the Bush administration for its own human rights abuses since the terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001.

The US has rarely or ever been formally condemned by the world body for its own transgressions of civil liberties. But criticisms of recent abuses -- including arbitrary detentions, torture and mistreatment of prisoners of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay -- were momentarily under the spotlight.

"The practice of incommunicado and secret detention should be ended immediately, and the (US) government should ensure that conditions of detention conformed to international standards," the proposed draft said.

But after driving home its point, Belarus formally withdrew the resolution before it could be debated and voted on. "The primary reason my delegation had introduced the draft was to demonstrate to the international community that no country in the world was immune to human rights problems and should, therefore, not be exempt from international scrutiny," Ambassador Andrei Dapkiunas of Belarus, told delegates. That draft resolution, "the first of its kind in United Nations history," had achieved that objective, he added.

The rising criticisms against the US have been prompted by the suspension of civil liberties and stringent new measures on detention -- all in the name of fighting terrorism. The Bush administration has also come under fire for turning a blind eye to military excesses committed by US soldiers both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Africans, on the other hand, rebelled against the European Union which was the primary sponsors of two resolutions condemning human rights abuses in Sudan and Zimbabwe. For the first time, both resolutions failed adoption because of open revolt against them.

Speaking on behalf of the African Group, the representative of South Africa told delegates: "Our vote is not an attempt to condone human rights violations. It is a vote to counter the double standards (on human rights) by the European Union."

Not surprisingly, a UN report released last month criticised most Western European nations for condoning racial discrimination, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

The right-wing government of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has two openly xenophobic parties, the National Alliance and the Northern League. "The representatives of these parties spread racist and anti-immigrant discourse in Italian society and have obtained the adoption of a particularly strict immigration law (the Bossi-Fini law, named for the leaders of these two parties), which was recently called into question by the Italian constitutional court," says the UN report currently before the General Assembly.

In France "the leading racist and xenophobic party" is the Front National, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who garnered 17 percent of the national vote in the 2002 presidential elections.

In Germany, the three main xenophobic and anti-Semitic parties are the German People's Union, the German National Democratic Party and the Republicans. The latest annual report of the country's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution reports there were 169 extreme right-wing groups in Germany by the end of 2003 (compared with 146 in 2002).

In Britain, the leading extremist political group is the British National Party (BNP), which in the 2003 election obtained the best results ever by an extreme right party since the 1970s.

A study conducted by the European Union Accession Monitoring Programme states the BNP has honed its "racism into a specifically anti-Muslim message."

Following Austria's 1999 election, the extreme-right Freedom Party (FPO) became the country's second most popular, with 27.7 percent of the vote, and joined the conservative People Party in the government.

In the Netherlands, the major peddlers of hate and xenophobia have been right-wing parties such as the Centrumdemcraten, Nieuwe Nationale Partij, the Nederlands Blok and a host of other extra-parliamentary groups.

But still none of these countries has been named or shamed by the General Assembly. "If the US and the European Union can get away scot-free with charges of human rights abuses", says one Asian diplomat, "how can you use a different yardstick to measure violations by other countries?"

Back to Columns