Viewpoint Leader like Robinson hard to find
By MARGARET SPILLANE
Despots should take no pleasure in
the announcement that Mary Robinson will be leaving her post as United Nations
High Commissioner for Human Rights. Whoever hires Robinson next should expect
her to give the job the same kind of radical overhaul she gave the U.N. Human
Rights Commission, turning it into a platform for the voiceless and a bullhorn
pointed at tyrants of every stripe.
Robinsons predecessor as high commissioner, Jose Alaya
Lasso, dispensed diplomacy more appropriate to hosting cocktail parties than to
confronting mass atrocities. Robinson transformed that invisible, do-nothing
office into a bully pulpit from which not only the likes of Libya, Cuba and
Iraq but Russia, Israel and the United States felt the astringent lash of her
plain speech on their respective human rights abuses.
And she didnt shrink from castigating NATO for inflicting
civilian-targeted cluster bombs on Serbia. From her earliest days at the Human
Rights Commission, Robinson has aggressively pushed the definition of human
rights beyond the civil liberties and freedom of speech model favored by the
West to encompass the right to food, basic shelter, education and health care,
as well as workers rights and cultural rights.
Before that, as president of Ireland from 1991 to 1996, she had
taken a ribbon-cutters sinecure and turned it into a forum that brought
the excluded Irish -- women, economic exiles, sexual minorities, the poor, the
disabled -- to the power center of the national discourse. She also used her
high profile as a lightning rod, visiting catastrophically violent sites like
Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda and describing with outraged precision the details
of what she witnessed to the international press corps that followed her.
Despite the changes she brought to the U.N. Human Rights
Commission, Robinson leaves the position with a deep sense of frustration. She
cites the fine language that all governments pay to human rights in
place of hard cash: The commissions budget constitutes less than 2
percent of the United Nations operating budget. Shes expressed
distress that the majority of the offices rapporteurs -- frontline
defenders of human rights doing the United Nations most dangerous jobs --
arent even afforded the dignity of full-time employment, but are sent
into the worlds most violent conflicts with only six- or even three-month
contracts. Yet the General Assembly continues to increase the commissions
mandate while keeping it on the same starvation budget.
In the over three and a half years Robinson has been at the
commission, the troubling presence of transnational corporate influence within
the United Nations has escalated. And at the annual Human Rights Commission
meeting last month -- the meeting at which Robinson announced her resignation
-- the Bush White House didnt bother to send a representative (Madeleine
Albright gave a speech at last years meeting).
The last big task of her term as high commissioner, the worldwide
conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, planned for late August, will
allow Robinson to go out as she came in -- with her outsiders
awkward voice speaking fiercely and explicitly, this time about the
globes bedrock injustice issue: how access to power, money, health,
education, jobs and justice are still a matter of race.
In replacing Robinson, Kofi Annan will have his work cut out for
him: Diplomats are a dime a dozen, and the now-activist Human Rights Commission
is no place for one. Annan needs to name and support someone who, like
Robinson, is a human rights crusader fearless about speaking the facts in plain
language.
Margaret Spillane teaches at Yale University and writes
frequently about culture and human rights. Her e-mail address is
margaret.spillane@yale.edu
National Catholic Reporter, April 13,
2001
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