We all share duty to challenge injustice

The world has a responsibility to ensure human rights are upheld, from Ireland to Syria and Afghanistan, writes Colm O’Gorman

LAST year, 100 people, including many children, died from cold or illness in camps in Kabul — right in the capital of Afghanistan where the international community has a relatively secure presence.

Around 200,000 people fled Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states in Sudan where fighting continues, in spite of the promised peace that was supposed to come with South Sudan’s independence.

As we publish Amnesty International’s annual report on the state of the world’s human rights, we are highlighting how the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place, creating a new global underclass of people forced from their homes to seek safety.

More than 42m people worldwide have now been forcibly displaced by conflict and persecution, according to the United Nations, the highest number since the mid-1990s.

After two years of relentless fighting, more than 1.5m people have now fled Syria in search of a safe haven. Another four million are internally displaced.

The Syrian military and security forces indiscriminately attack, detain, torture and kill civilians. Opposition armed groups are also carrying out summary killings and torture, although not to the same degree.

Yet China and Russia continue to protect Syria at the UN Security Council. Despite daily new evidence of crimes against humanity and war crimes, the Security Council has yet to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.

The international community is a victim of its own inconsistencies. Governments ignore and hide human rights abuses by allies and only condemn those committed by their rivals in power politics.

This will not change until the UN Security Council accepts that human rights are a universal concern and consistently stands up to abusive governments, refusing to allow powerful states to pick and choose who should be held accountable.

Internationally, Ireland has always been a strong supporter of human rights.

The Government should be congratulated for ensuring that, despite the current financial crisis, we are the highest per capita donor of humanitarian assistance to the millions fleeing the fighting in Syria.

But support for human rights abroad, must be matched by a similar determination at home.

Ireland is one of a handful of western European countries that has not signed the Council of Europe Convention on Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence.

We sit on the UN Human Rights Council. We have a position of leadership across the continent while we hold the EU presidency. But we are slow to do what is right for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Irish women.

Instead of strengthening protections for those at risk of violence by signing up to this convention, we seem content to keep pushing it to the bottom of the ‘to do’ list.

The death of Savita Halapannavar in October exposed the lack of clarity about abortion in Ireland.

The Government’s determination to introduce legislation to clarify our laws is welcome, but it must not lead to the criminalisation of women or a law that is so restrictive it is unworkable.

States should provide legal, safe and accessible abortion where there is a risk to a woman or girl’s life, or a grave risk to her health, or where her pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. Even with the proposed new legislation, Ireland’s laws are a long way from our international human rights obligations.

By its very nature, our annual report is bleak reading. Across more than 300 pages we see recorded the very worst that we do to each other; torture, executions, abuse, neglect, discrimination.

But every year, we also see the change that ordinary people bring about.

In Ireland last year, the Government enacted legislation criminalising female genital mutilation and committed to ratifying a new UN complaints mechanism for people in Ireland whose rights like health, housing and education are not being delivered.

We saw further proof last June when a woman who has spent most of her life in detention came to Dublin. Imprisoned by a brutal military government, Aung San Suu Kyi would have been forgotten were it not for the efforts of millions of people around the world who campaigned for her freedom. Now, she has taken her rightful place at the head of the campaign for freedom and democracy in her native country.

Earlier this year, at the United Nations in New York, the world’s first treaty to regulate the sale and transfer of conventional arms like rifles, machine guns and tanks was agreed. It took 20 years of hard work to achieve something many international experts believed impossible, and to begin to regulate an arms trade responsible for the death of one person every single minute.

Achievements like this remind us that change is possible.

But whether it is campaigning for the release of a single prisoner, for an international treaty, or for better rights protections in Ireland, the lesson is the same; we all share the responsibility to challenge injustice. There are no bystanders.

The American union leader Eugene Debs once said: “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not my any maudlin sentimentality, but by the higher duty I owe myself.”

It is only by responding to that higher duty we owe ourselves, by refusing to stand by when injustice happens to others and we remain unaffected, that the human rights abuses outlined in this year’s annual report can be ended, and those responsible brought to justice.

*Colm O’Gorman is executive director of Amnesty International Ireland