Issue 42 August 2008 - Transcript on opening of SHRC /EHRC office: Mary Robinson, Kenny MacAskill, Alan Miller, Alex Fergusson

The following is a transcript of the opening of the new co-located office of the Scottish Human Rights Commission with the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Glasgow, on 20 June 2008. Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, Professor Alan MIller, Dr Maurice Manning (IHRC), Presiding Officer Alex Fergusson MSP and Morag Alexander (EHRC) all spoke at the event.

KENNY MacASKILL

It gives me great pleasure to help mark the co-location of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Scottish Commission for Human Rights. The Scottish Government is fully committed to promoting equality and human rights, and looks forward to working closely with the SCHR in helping to achieve that aim. I am also pleased and honoured that Mary Robinson has been able to come to lend her support. She has been a tireless campaigner for human rights both as President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and since then she has continued her work for human rights around the world. The fact of such an internationally-renowned figure being here in Glasgow today shows how seriously human rights are being taken here in Scotland, and how seriously Scotland is being taken on the international stage. 

MORAG ALEXANDER:

Can I say just a little bit about my organisation, the Equality & Human Rights Commission. We aim to create an ambitious, fair and confident Scotland and for those of you who wonder why, after 10 years of waiting for a Human Rights Commission, for two to come along at once, that's been a challenge for us. But the important thing is that we now co-locate with the Scottish Commission for Human Rights, we are sharing offices with them in Glasgow and also in the town in Edinburgh. So we are delighted to welcome them to our premises and the important thing is that the people who will use our services and who will seek our advice can get seamless advice. When they phone they will talk to our helpline who will answer questions, not just for the Equality & Human Rights Commission issues, but also for the devolved Human Rights issues that are the responsibility of the Scottish Human Rights Commission. So we hope that no-one will be too confused about whose responsibility is what. Both organisations are here to be champions for Equality and Human Rights. When the Equality and Human Rights Commission did a poll last autumn to ask the British people about what they wanted us in the Equality and Human Rights Commission to prioritise, what they said was that the top of the priority list was an idea, the idea that we should be an advocate for fairness, that we should make our case for equality and that we should be trying to change the way our society works. So we are delighted to have the opportunity here in Scotland to be sharing that responsibility with the Scottish Human Rights Commission. I will stop there and will invite Alan Miller who is the chair of the Scottish Human Rights Commission to come up and say a few words too.

ALAN MILLER:

Can I welcome all of you to what is a very proud occasion for Scotland. It has been said we waited some time for this day for the creation of the Scottish Human Rights Commission. I know some of you have been a little bit frustrated perhaps by the length of the wait but if you have to wait for a special year in which to create a Scottish Human Rights Commission then the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a year worth waiting for and a huge birthmark the Commission has, making it a very big challenge for us to live up to the responsibility of promoting and protecting the rights contained within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There have been a number of milestones in the life of the Commission, even though we've not really yet properly opened our doors or become operational. Many things have been said about our Scottish Parliament. Our Presiding Officer is sitting here so ... one of the things that I want to say about the Parliament is that it has a rich sense of humour. You may not know this, but the Parliament chose to give us formal powers on April Fool's Day and you can read into that what you like. Then they followed that up by on May Day with an SOS announcement as the three part-time Commissioners were publicly identified and I'm very proud to be able to just reintroduce my colleagues who have been appointed by the Parliament: Professor Kay Hampton who is known I am sure to many of you from the Glasgow Caledonian university; Shelagh McCall, an advocate and currently seconded to the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, returning next month to take up her post with us; and John McNeill who also may be known to you as a respected former senior civil servant with a background in the administration of justice and a son of Northern Ireland. We poached him from our colleagues in Northern Ireland! In terms of where the Commission is and where it's going and further milestones on this human rights journey in Scotland, we obviously are very proud today to be moving into co-location with the Equality and Human Rights Commission and we look forward to developing an effective working relationship with it. This morning we had a very nice gathering of our friends from across the water, a delegation from the Irish Human Rights Commission in Dublin and from the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission in Belfast. This was something that was very precious for us in the Scottish Human Rights Commission. I'll say a little bit more about each of them when I come to ask them to say a few words. But it's very important for us to have close ties and working relationships with those national Human Rights Commissions that share a lot of the issues that will be addressed by us here in Scotland. We also had a very welcoming visit from the Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill who spoke very, very positively this morning and committed the Scottish Government to further promotion of human rights and having a constructive relationship with the Scottish Human Rights Commission. It was a very well-received presentation from the Justice Secretary. From now we expect to be placing adverts in the newspapers in the next week or 10 days to recruit staff (which we hope to do over the summer) and then, according to the mandate that we have under the Act that created us, we will be preparing a draft strategic plan for the next four years and we will be presenting that to the Parliament on December 10, International Human Rights Day-which of course is the special occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have taken various initiatives in advance of that and we will be seeing a lot of you over the next few weeks and months and getting to know as many of you as we can, to learn from you what your expectations are of the Commission and to try to explain to you the nature of our mandate and to develop close working relationships with as many bodies and civic organisations as we can. I just would now like to very briefly introduce and say a few words about our colleagues from the two Irish Commissions. First of all, Dr Maurice Manning, the president of the Irish Human Rights Commission. It's a very important relationship in my view between our two commissions and it's one of these wonderful things in these islands. They don't have a huge human rights community and so those who have been active in the field of human rights for decades get to know each other very well and work very well together, and even though the Human Rights Commission here in Scotland is literally being born just now, the ties between some of the individuals within the Scottish Commission and the Irish Commission go back a long, long way. One of the Commissioners with whom Maurice works with is Michael Farrell. Michael was chair of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties throughout the 80s and 90s when I was chair of the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties. These relationships are very, very important. They invest in future relations between the two commissions and the last four or five years I have been a fairly frequent visitor to Dublin and Maurice has been over here, as have other colleagues and on this day it would not really be a proper introduction of the Human Rights Commission and co-location with our British colleagues without also having the presence of the Irish. Maurice has also helped us immensely in the last six months or so since I was appointed to give us very practical advice about how we build and develop the Human Rights Commission and has introduced us to the International Co-ordinating Committee of National Human Rights Institutes, which is a network around the world of 70 Human Rights Commissions. So I'm very, very grateful to Maurice. The main thing we have got from the Irish of course is Mary but even putting Mary to the side, which I don't think is possible, we're very, very grateful to have the Irish Commission with us and Maurice if you would like to say a few words.  

MAURICE MANNING:

The last time I was in Scotland was in Edinburgh, six years ago, and there was a major seminar on the establishment of the Scottish Human Rights Commission and a feeling then was that the establishment was imminent. So imminent sometimes takes a bit longer and in this case it is six years later. But it is a very, very proud moment today that this Commission is being established and certainly we look forward very much to working within the European network and working internationally with Alan and his Commission. National Human Rights Commissions are very much a growing world phenomenon. Fifteen years ago there were 10 or 12 accredited commissions. Today there are well over 70, maybe 80 commissions which have the accreditation to describe themselves as National Human Rights Commissions. They differ very much-a Human Rights Commission operating in Uganda or in one of the third world countries is going to have very different problems, very different circumstances to a Human Rights Commission in Scotland where there is a very sophisticated, very well-developed sense of human rights. But there are two things about Human Rights Commissions. First is that they must pass the test of principles. There are certain attributes without which they may not be called a National Human Rights Commission. These are the common principles of openness and accountability, transparency of independence, most of all of plurality-various principles which a Human Rights Commission must pass before it can be a Human Rights Commission. The second thing about a Human Rights Commission of course is that its fundamental aim is to promote and protect human rights. How this is done in each particular country is really a matter for the Commission itself, to ensure it doesn't duplicate what has been done elsewhere, to ensure that it is adding value to everything it does, to ensure that at its heart it never loses the message of why it is here. That is why, as President of the European Group of National Commissions, I'm so happy today to be here as the Scottish Commission is being born. I've known Alan for a long time and we were all thrilled when he was named as the first Chair because we know that under him the development of the Commission will be focused, it will have huge integrity and it will never lose sight of what it is about.  

ALAN MILLER:

Thank you very much Maurice. It is very much appreciated. I would now like to say a few words about the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. This is a Commission that was born into very, very difficult conditions in Northern Ireland. We all know the history and it has faced many, many challenges over the last few years and has won through very hard times winning increasing respect within the Northern Ireland community but also internationally for the role that it has played in capacity building and sharing experience and the difficulties it has faced in very challenging circumstances in Northern Ireland. I had personal long-standing relations with the Commission going back to the first Chief Commissioner Professor Bryce Dickson and first Chief Executive Officer Paddy Sloane. Bryce and Paddy have since moved on and Professor McWilliams, the new Chief Commissioner, was with us this morning. She has had to leave early to go back to Belfast and we have Nasir Latif with us who will say a few words. So there's a long history of ties between Scotland and Northern Ireland and the human rights communities in both countries. Today would not have been the right day to introduce the Scottish Human Rights Commission and it's part-time Commissioners without having a representative from Belfast to speak with us. Nasir Latif and I have known each other for a little while and I appreciated the support that I got a few months ago from the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission when Nasir arranged my security pass to get in at the UN building in Geneva. We weren't yet fully established so I was snuck in at the coattail of Nasir after some bureaucracy and administrative wrangling. It's great to have you here, Nasir, and if you would like to say a few words, I would appreciate it.  

NASIR:

On behalf of the other Commissioners and other staff of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, I would like to wish Alan Miller and his Commissioners all the best in their work in both educating and challenging as the situation demands, but I suppose I would also like to congratulate you on being instrumental in getting this far in getting a commission for Scotland in the first place. So thank you and I wish you all the best.    

ALAN MILLER:

I would now like to briefly introduce to say a few words Alex Fergusson MSP and Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament.  

ALEX FERGUSSON:

As Presiding Officer and Chair of the two appointment boards for the Commission I am genuinely honoured to have been invited to say a few words today on behalf of the Scottish Parliament at this reception which of course marks the co-location of the Scottish Commission for Human Rights and the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission, a co-location if I may say so that is both eminently practical and also enormously sensible. I think it bodes very well for the future workings of both organisations together here in Scotland. So here in the heart of Glasgow the Optima building will now become the central focus for people of Scotland on issues concerning equalities and human rights. It's a joint venture, as you know. We're working together on an approach to promoting and understanding respect for human rights in Scotland. As mentioned, as Presiding Officer I had the enormous pleasure and frankly the great privilege of chairing the board which appointed Professor Alan Miller and then Shelagh McCall, John McNeil and Professor Kay Hampton as the three part-time members. All these are very talented individuals and bring with them varied and significant expertise to their posts. I am quite sure in them we have a very strong team that will work well together. I look forward to seeing the Scottish Human Rights Commission go from strength to strength under their leadership. Across the Scottish Parliament there is a fundamental belief in art.1-that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity. That's a belief that is reflected throughout our Parliamentary life. The fact, e.g. that equal opportunities is one of our four key founding principles and the commitment found by the Parliament's Corporate Body in development of a robust framework for equalities along with race, gender and disability equality schemes. There is also the important work of our equal opportunities committee and numerous events held within the Parliament such as the anti-sectarian exhibition which promoted artwork and measures taken by schools across Scotland to reduce anti-sectarianism. They include "time for reflection" which is an opportunity for people of all faiths and none to share their thoughts in our Parliamentary chamber at the start of each week's business. We include Parliamentary information in a range of different languages and had a recent pilot of an audio description service to improve access to the blind and partially sighted people. These add to our growing list of provisions for making the Parliament equally accessible to everyone. In my speeches to audiences both within and outwith the Parliament, I have the opportunity of conveying the message that we are all Scotland's people, all equally important in the growing of this great country of ours and, as the Parliament of Scotland, we want to work with others wherever possible to remove the barriers that prevent people from participating in Scottish society and thus reaching their full potential. It's for that reason today that I am again privileged and delighted to convey very best wishes of the Scottish Parliament to this joint venture and this launch today. As you now move forward with the task of establishing the office. I would encourage you above all to keep engaging with us, to keep engaging with the Parliament, and I hope that we can all work together in a partnership that you have typified today in working to promote a spirit of respect across Scotland and through its people. Thank you very much indeed for having me.  

ALAN MILLER:

I'd like to say a very few words to introduce Mary. Some of you out there know I've been active in the field of human rights for several decades, the 80s and 90s were largely spent in Scotland. I have been disguised as an academic and lawyer but am an activist underneath all those trappings. Inevitably, as a human rights activist in Scotland, you knew about Mary Robinson from her previous post as president of Ireland and for then taking the post of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1997. In the last decade I have had the privilege of working in the field of human rights in many different parts of the world in capacity building in one respect or another, working with the UN and with governments, with NGOs, with civic society. It's through that decade's experience that I really began to understand and appreciate the leading role that Mary plays globally in the field of human rights and she remains, in my humble opinion, the voice of human rights in the world today. It was a wonderful moment earlier on in the office this morning when Mary gave us a copy of her book which is quite simply called "The Voice of Human Rights" and it will take a proud place as the first book in the library of the Scottish Human Rights Commission and be treasured and we will buy many more copies, Mary, from the publishers and distribute them! You all know Mary. There's nothing more I want to say other than if there's one person we want to share today with, then it's Mary and we are overjoyed to be able to introduce her to you.  

MARY ROBINSON:

Thank you very much, Alan, for those warm words but the truth is I'm really delighted to be here. Do you remember how quickly I said yes? Delighted for a number of reasons. First of all, the texture of this morning having the heads and key personnel of the four Human Rights Commissions, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the new Scottish Human Rights Commission with Alan and the two from the island of Ireland, Maurice Manning from Dublin and Monica McWilliams, who unfortunately had to leave us to catch a flight to Belfast, and their colleagues. It was a very special occasion because it was clear that there's going to be a lot of interaction, sharing of experience and working together and that's a great strength and, secondly, I had that feeling of a generous outreach to a part of the world that I spend a lot of time in the possibility of linking to support the establishment of Human Rights Commissions or their strengthening in different parts of the world. But let me begin with my own congratulations to everybody who has been involved whether in advocacy and pressure or support, etc. of the Scottish Human Rights Commission. It is something really to be celebrated and you are fortunate to have leading the Scottish Human Rights Commission a human rights advocate of the calibre of Alan Miller. He is an advocate, he's a teacher, he's had practical experience, he has worked very hard in tough areas like Iraq and he also brings a good corporate experience, corporate responsibility which I think is going to be a very important area indeed. That's where we worked most closely together in recent years because Alan is the special adviser of the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights which was established in May 2003 in Brussels and I had the honour to be the honorary chair. Quite frankly I learned a lot because it's a business-led initiative and when it was first established it was modelled on the Business Leaders Initiative on Climate Change, but actually climate change is much easier for corporations than working on their appropriate responsibility for human rights. So we had trouble getting certain pioneer companies together and they were European companies at the time ranging from Barclays Bank to ABB to Statoil, Novartis, MTV Europe-quite a range-and then other companies began to join and when the mandate was renewed by these companies that they go for another three years, we actually had to stop the number at 14 and they include very major companies like Coca-Cola, GE, Ericsson, a French company Arriva, and other companies would have liked to join and part of the reason I think is that the intellectual discussion is at a very high level and the dilemmas are very real. Let me give you a flavour because Alan was particularly working in this area and giving advice. It happens that two of the members of the Business Leaders Initiative do work in Sudan, one being Ericsson, supplying infrastructure for telecommunications and the other being ABB providing electricity infrastructure more or less. ABB in particular came under a lot of public pressure from the Save Darfur Campaign and there were those who felt that as a business they should have been taking a responsible position and not working in Sudan. What ABB did was say "we're in a dilemma here because we're providing electricity apparatus for very poor people in a part of Sudan that's very far away from Darfur but we're very concerned because we're a company that has engaged with the human rights agenda and what is our responsibility? What do we do?" They engaged in a very wide stakeholder discussion which Alan played quite a role in. One of the outcomes, I think, was that ABB came out for a while-are they back at this stage? Maybe-but what they have done is they have encouraged the establishment in Sudan of a local network under the Global Compact (the UN Global Compact) where in a voluntary way corporations can sign up to uphold 10 principles. Actually the first two principles are to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and not be complicit in its violation and then core environmental standards, labour principles and the 10th principle is tackling corruption. The work of trying to see through those dilemmas is a new kind of challenge. It's working with various sectors to widen the sense of who should be trying to uphold the human rights agenda, and when I was preparing to come here and say a few words to you, I actually read a speech Alan gave in 2005 in which he argued the value of a Scottish Human Rights Commission. I want to quote what Alan said at that time in 2005. He said: "The creation of a Scottish Human Rights Commission could provide a focus and be a catalyst in the development of a rights aware culture within Scotland, of connecting human rights and governance with the consequent increased national self-confidence. It could connect the two dimensions of human rights of holding public authority to account as well as building the capacity of public and private institutions to carry out their responsibilities. It would make the connection between Scotland and the world in the field of governance and human rights through its role within the UN system of human rights promotion and protection and directly linking with other national human rights institutions in the developing world." I think that captured the situation very well and I think it has been fulfilled in the way that the Scottish Human Rights Commission has been established. It was an ambitious and praiseworthy vision and now all Alan has to do is implement it. Luckily for him he is not alone. He has a very distinguished team with him who I had the pleasure of meeting today and I could tell that they were establishing a very good relationship together. Let me just say a few words about how I came to know about National Human Rights Commissions myself and how I came to value them. It was when I was appointed as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in September 1997. I had to get to know all the different workings and there were at that time about a dozen, maybe a little more, Human Rights Commissions and they were mainly in the developing world. Canada had one but they were mainly in countries like India, Mexico, various countries in Africa and the beginnings of Human Rights Commissions in Asia. I learned from a colleague who was working specifically on this issue the importance, as we have heard, of the principles of certain standards being required before a national Human Rights Commission would be accredited and could participate in discussions in Geneva and could count itself as having the full authority of a National Human Rights Commission. This was extremely important because Governments wanted in some cases to have a National Human Rights Commission that was not complying with the basic standards of the Paris Principles-and we always said that they were the minimum standards, that hopefully commissions would go further than the Paris Principles themselves-but they have been very useful. I also learned from Human Rights NGOs how important it was that Human Rights Commissions were in good dialogue with them. In a couple of countries the Human Rights Commission wanted to have a monopoly of how human rights would be dealt with in the country and were sidelining NGOs, small groups dealing with various issues in human rights and were taking a rather safe approach to human rights and excluding the activist voices of the human rights community. So there were all these potential issues. I used to welcome very much the annual meeting in Geneva and I helped with my colleagues in the Office of the High Commissioner at the time to ensure that more and more the voices of the representatives of the Human Rights Commissions were heard at the time in the UN Human Rights Commission and now of course in the Human Rights Council, because this was an important voice of those who were the link between Government and the wider community and citizens of a country appointed by a Government, not an NGO but independent of the Government to critique, scrutinise and monitor and, if necessary, to take some action that governments might not wish to happen at all. It really was a very good learning experience. I also realised that it was possible to encourage Human Rights Commissions to take on certain issues and that you then had a broad range of different perspectives. One of those was a very difficult issue at the time. As well as being UN Commissioner for Human Rights, I was appointed, lucky me, to be Secretary General of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa-a very difficult conference. It was a time when perhaps understandably because of the lack of progress in the Middle East the Palestinian people were looking for opportunities to raise their case on the international stage and naturally the World Conference against Racism was an obvious one. But it did lead to very nasty anti-semitic demonstrations-in the streets and in the forum I have to say-but prior to and after the world conference, the National Human .Rights Commissions looked at issues of racism probably for the first time in a number of cases in different parts of the world. It was very interesting to see how those discussions emerged. I understand the National Human Rights Commissions at the moment are about to begin a fairly serious examination of the area that Alan has been working on as adviser to the Business Leaders Initiative of Human Rights. The Commissions are going to look at business and human rights and there's every reason why they would do that because the report which was submitted to this session of the Human Rights Council by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights, Professor John Ruggie, is a report with huge implications both for governments and for business worldwide. John Ruggie framed his most recent report which has been accepted by the Human Rights Council around three concepts: protect, respect and remedy. The "protect" is a finding he made after fully examining, and recommending to the Human Rights Council that they accepted, that States have a duty to protect their people from violations of their human rights by non-State actors, and in this case by corporations. This is a duty which is always implicitly and vaguely there but which is largely ignored by governments. Host countries, countries for the business operating and home countries-the countries where the business was registered have a duty to prevent violations of human rights by those corporations. You can all reflect on the implications of that. The second recommendation which was accepted by the Human Rights Council was that corporations have a responsibility to respect all human rights. So that puts an end to corporate responsibility. It's not voluntary, it's a finding that there is an appropriate responsibility. It has been compared with due diligence and he has asked that companies take that due diligence responsibility seriously and engage in having a human rights policy if necessary and, if they are doing large constructions, looking at human rights impact assessments perhaps and having guidelines, etc. and having it as part of the corporate sustainability and corporate responsibility and this again will have implications and I think Human Rights Commissions can play a very significant role in giving guidance and holding to account.. In order to move on, I would like to just end by reflecting on a theme which has come up in what others have said this year of 2008, a very good year to launch a Human Rights Commission here in Scotland, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The honourable Presiding Officer, Alex Fergusson, used very nice words about the atmosphere in this room which I too have felt about the palpable warmth and the friendship in the room. So I am going to keep in informal terms about how much this document means to me in a very real way because when I became UN High Commissioner as I mentioned I went to an office that had a lot of problems, more problems that I had anticipated: a small underfunded office with a huge mandate, with low morale. I won't go into all the details. It was a small group in the office and one of the people on the group was Scott Jeremy, my colleague who I hope will be joining us. He is on his way from Geneva. I asked them, you know, how are you preparing for the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration in 1998. They said well, we're looking at what they did with the 40th anniversary and we're trying to see what we can do with new developments since then and we have a new tool. I said tell me more. They said yes, you remember that the office now has this website that we have been discussing in other areas and this website will be very useful to us because we will be able to put language versions of the Universal Declaration on the website. So we did. The UN is very good at this. We got 236 language versions. During 1998, the 50th anniversary year, I went to China and before I went to China I had a lot of hard bargaining with the Chinese authorities that I wouldn't go unless I got to go to Tibet. No, no, no: yes, yes, yes. Anyway, in Tibet I went into a school in Lhasa and distributed copies of this Universal Declaration in the Tibetan language and one of my officers whispered in my ear this was potentially not conforming with Chinese law, but I was High Commissioner ... nobody stopped us from handing out the language version. Then a wonderful thing happened which Maurice Manning and his colleagues will appreciate: I got into the Guinness Book of Records for the most translated document in the world. The only trouble is it may be the most translated but it isn't the most read and it isn't the most implemented and that's the challenge. I do want to refer to two dimensions of the Universal Declaration that I think we have undertalked in the Human Rights community and one is that this Universal Declaration of Human Rights wasn't just addressed to governments. Yes, of course governments have the primary responsibility to protect and promote human rights but the General Assembly, when it met in Paris on December 10th, 60 years ago this year, began by saying as follows: "Now, therefore, the General Assembly proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations to the end that every individual and every organ of society keeping this declaration constantly in mind shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures nationally and internationally to secure the universal and effective recognition and observance." So Eleanor Roosevelt and her colleagues, the jurists members, China, the Lebanon and Chile and France and Canada were keen and the General Assembly when it adopted it thought we would carry it around and take it out every morning and have a look and live by these values and that we would also live in a balanced way by which values of human rights that spoke about civil and political rights and also economic, social and cultural rights. I think we need during this 60th anniversary year to reclaim that sense of human rights belonging to people, a birthright. The Presiding Officer quoted that all human beings are born free in equal dignity, dignity for rights, that sense of identity, of selfworth, of spirituality, of what comprises individuals and how they see themselves and how they link with others. Then the next article, the second last one, article 29-again I think human rights people haven't put this forward strongly enough-it is: "Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible." So one thing that annoys me about the Declaration is that it's not very gender sensitive. You have to keep reading it again: his and her. But think of the idea that we have a duty to community, that you don't reach the full potential of your own personality unless you do something about that. This morning I was very pleased in our discussion to hear that notion of community come out strongly but it's a very strong notion here in Scotland and it reminded me-if I can use one phrase of Gaelic because I am in Scotland-of a lovely Irish phrase (Gaelic): it's in eacb otber's sbadow tbat we flourisb. That's a sort of translation. It's with our links together that we flourish. I think that the four Commissions could strengthen human rights by making it more user-friendly, human, by linking the dignity and rights to communities by making it something that belongs to the most marginalised, to those who feel most excluded, most denied voices both in our own societies and internationally and then we will have achieved what translating it into many languages doesn't necessarily achieve, even if you do get the Guinness Book of Records! So can I end with a small ask to everybody here and my friends in the Human Rights Commissions. I was joking them, not really joking this morning by saying that I was shocked to find I was eligible about a year ago or over a year ago to be invited to become one of the Elders that Nelson Mandela has got together along with Archbishop Tutu, Kofi Annan and Jimmy Carter. We had a planning meeting in May in Africa and I was delighted that we decided to adopt the Universal Declaration as part of the constitution of the Elders. We had a vision statement but this was also part of it (and the doctrine of responsibility to protect and in the development goals but this in particular). So we launched a campaign on December 10th last year-a year's campaign about bringing hope to people that there is an individual responsibility in relation to the Universal Declaration and we have called it "every human has rights" and the website is the same way http://www.everybumanbasrigbts.org [Accessed August 8, 2008]. Then in our foolishness as Elders we said we would like a billion people to go into this website or go through many others like Amnesty, they all have these widgets which is a new technical term for me. I am becoming more technically adroit. There are widgets that link to this website and you are invited to go in and read the Universal Declaration and then sign up to a very simple declaration. The idea is that we want a sixth of humanity over the next few years to make human rights personal to them so that governments will realise that human rights don't belong to governments, they belong to people, and governments simply have the duty and responsibility to implement them. So you see the duty you all have to help these Elders to get to the billion. Thank you very much.  

ALAN MILLER:

Thank you very much, Mary. As you have seen, Mary is an inspiring voice for human rights. The source of Mary's inspiration is, as she has said, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With the birth of our Commission the 60th anniversary is a proud one and I think sometimes it is easy in our sometimes cynical cultural times to underestimate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be a little bit superficial or to be dismissive of it, 60 years ago you know, look what's happening around the world-what's the big deal? I am reminded when Mary was talking about the Universal Declaration of the unfulfilled power that the Declaration has and the vitality and the complete relevance it has to today's problems being addressed in the world. Just to share one very brief inspiration that I experienced last year while I was working with the Palestinian Bar Association from the West Bank on behalf of the International Bar Association, which has a Human Rights Institute which builds capacity among lawyers around the world, particularly in the most challenging circumstances, and a colleague and myself, the colleague being Nasser Amin from Cairo, were asked to go and work with the Palestinian Bar Association. The programme was to be for five days and on the first day Nasser and I got to our feet to introduce how the International Human Rights system worked, the treaty bodies etc. We got 30 seconds into our presentation when a very well respected Palestinian lawyer stood up. He was known to have been tortured and imprisoned for five years in an Israeli jail. He said why should we listen to you? The International Human Rights community, the UN has abandoned us, we're neglected. What have we got to learn from you? Nasser and I have taken this on the chin before in other contexts and we took it on the chin and accepted completely why he was saying this, but we appealed to him and through him to his colleagues, look, things shouldn't be so bad that we can't have some common space just as fellow lawyers-not as representatives of governments or the UN-just to share human rights experience and practice. It was touch and go whether we were going to get consent to go ahead with this training programme. It was very tense and there were 50 lawyers, 10 of whom were women, and one young female lawyer came forward and said just one phrase: "Brothers and sisters, is it not better that we light a candle than curse the darkness." The atmosphere changed. She spoke in a language they understood and Nasser and I traced where this phrase came from because it's a very useful phrase to use. Apparently it was said by Adlay Stevenson who was the US representative to the UN about Eleanor Roosevelt and her role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the holocaust, the two World Wars, the Great Depression, etc. and what he said about her was that within the UN system this was lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. So the power of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights really cannot be underestimated-here was a young Palestinian lawyer using a quote from an American about another American about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which hadn't taken root in her soil but she was still committed to it being the only way forward that she could see. So it's an inspiration that it is as relevant today as it has been in the past. Mary has raised a lot of issues. One of them is dignity and the only announcement we will make today about the Scottish Human Rights Commission going forward is that the first conference we are organising in collaboration with the University of Strathclyde this autumn will be to explore this very question of human dignity and to try to give it some content, some application. We are very lucky to have some high level academics. Professor Jeremy Waldron from New York University is coming to speak to us on current interpretations of human dignity and we hope to have as many practitioners from various sectors in Scotland come to try and combine the theory and practice of taking human dignity into public services and standards, etc. that should be met and to give it some definition and some guarantee. I would encourage everyone to look out for the conference in the autumn. I would now like to invite questions, comments, perspectives from anyone-meanwhile, can I open the floor up to questions or comments?  

NEW SPEAKER:

Mine is a simple question. How can we help the people of Zimbabwe? It's not an easy question to answer.  

MARY ROBINSON:

It's an important question at the moment. Again, as one of those who has been following very closely a very grim situation I get daily briefings about it and, you know, it's worse than you read about. Kofi Annan had a very tough editorial in the Financial Times about two or three days ago on behalf of the Elders and you probably also saw, and I would think this was important a whole page advertisement in the Financial Times brought about by a foundation that I'm on, the board of eminent Africans, saying that this is not acceptable. That was important because a lot of them were saying it privately but people weren't saying it publicly. In recent days it is very interesting that representatives of the governments in the region, neighbouring governments, have begun to say, "we will not accept an election which is palpably not free and fair. We don't see how this can be free and fair." So the message is now going out and that won't mean that there is safety or security. It could mean the opposite. So I think we have every reason to be very concerned, Interestingly, in recent months in particular in the last year there has been quite a lot of work done by women leaders linking women at grass roots, and within Zimbabwe there's an incredible group of women and they include lawyers, community workers and academics and, you know, they are a very vibrant society in Zimbabwe-there's some discussion about somebody potentially from the outside going to make them visible, to help them with their voice. Part of the problem with that is would it make them less secure in a very volatile situation. But I think the most important thing that had to happen was that the African neighbours got their minds right on the fact that this is totally unacceptable and it wasn't possible really to do much from the outside because Mugabe was twisting that and all too effective at twisting it. I'm very fearful at the moment because people are being killed, horribly tortured, being driven from their homes, food is being used as a way of getting votes and aid agencies are not allowed to operate there. Oxfam and Save the Children are in terrible dilemmas about how to operate in a situation like that. Luckily they have local staff who can still go round. It's a real human rights issue, It brings up the problem of the General Assembly having adopted the idea of "responsibility to protect". It doesn't come up immediately in Zimbabwe but it could come up very quickly if things get dramatically worse. But it has come up in Darfur and Chad and they are getting worse now and we are still not willing to move up to a doctrine we espoused. So implementation is always the problem. While we are waiting for hands to show could I just say one thing in response to the fact you are focusing on dignity which I am very interested in. I maybe should have mentioned earlier that I was invited to co-chair what is being seen as a kind of follow up to the 60th anniversary. One of the things we realised is that although there was a lot of interest in the Universal Declaration, after the 50th anniversary there was no real follow up. There are two governments involved at the moment and they want other regional governments to join them and sort of make it broad based but Switzerland and Norway have launched an initiative for the next decade of the future of human rights and I have been asked to co-chair it with Paulo Pinero of Brazil who has done a great deal of work with the UN. He was the rapporteur on violence against children until recently he became special rapporteur in Burma. He was a Minister of Human Rights in Brazil for a number of years. There were, I think, about 10 of us in Geneva just starting this discussion but interestingly we decided not to call it a human rights agenda-we haven't finalised what the title will be-but it will involve dignity and rights because we want to get the point across that human rights is not the narrow agenda that a lot of people see it as-politicised, double standards and under a lot of threat, especially since 9/11-but a human rights agenda starts as being a birth right and reinforces the dignity of everybody. It aligns with another Commission I was very happy to be involved in which I would recommend as what could be a very fertile ground for Human Rights Commissions and that is that the Commission on Legal Empowerment has just issued a report called "making law work for the poor" and it has a lot of interesting ways of completely turning round how we address poverty. We've underestimated the importance of access to justice, access to legal regimes, the fact that 70 to 75 per cent to 80 to 85 per cent of populations in the poorest countries are completely outside the rule of law, outside access to justice, don't know anything about human rights and live in the informal sector where they do their best. They don't have land security, their children are not registered at birth and so on. They live in a sort of twilight and sometimes do incredibly well given there is no structure. This commission is trying to address the importance of working for everyone, working for the poor and I think it could be maybe a subject for the 70 plus Human Rights Commissions to look at from a national point of view. It could be very valuable.   

NEW SPEAKER:

Capability Scotland. Hearing you talk about the relationship between dignity and human rights I would be interested to hear how you see the interaction between equality and human rights.  

NEW SPEAKER:

Eileen, Save the Children. My question about our convention within a convention on rights of the child. I wondered during your time as the Commissioner how much you interacted with that convention and whether or not that strengthened the whole issue of human rights for children or whether in fact it was in danger of marginalising.  

MARY ROBINSON:

A good question as well. I have already made the point which isn't entirely a joke that the Universal Declaration is not as strong on gender language as it should be, but it is strong on the commitment to equality and I would say that the dignity also imports a non-discrimination on all the grounds that the Equality and Human Rights Commission here in Scotland and the UK is concerned about because it is an equality in every sense in relation to, you know, no discrimination on the basis of sex, on the basis of sexual preferences, people with disabilities and I'm sure I have left out several. I need to go back to the language of the Universal Declaration and add to it. What a lot of women's organisations do feel is that, even though Beijing made that ringing declaration that women's rights are human rights, women's rights and issues of equality don't always get the central role in discussions on human rights, that gender becomes an add-on and gender isn't about women, it's about the difference between how men and women, girls and boys are impacted or involved or can participate and this isn't appreciated. I think we have a long way to go but for me it's absolutely crucial and I'm working very hard with my colleagues at the moment in the context of the preparations for the assessment of the aid programmes of governments and it will take place in Ghana, the Paris declaration on aid effectiveness, the policies in support of the countries reaching Millennium Development Goals because there is the human rights agenda and environmental sustainability. A number of us have felt very strongly that these are kind of add-ons that don't get the attention they should have in the core policy but if we're serious, then the policies should reflect the human rights approach, a strong agenda from the beginning built in at every level and every dimension. That would make a big difference because we would need much more data, we would have different policies, we would have different participation by women at all levels and it would address that. So equality between men and women but equality also in all of the other ways in which we have to prevent discrimination and have supportive policies as necessary. I happen to believe that in the context of women's participation quotas can be very important. I have been very impressed by the difference they have made in so many countries and the country that is the most startling in the difference it has made is Rwanda, which has the highest number of women in Parliament in the world, higher than the Scandinavian countries that we sometimes look to. On the second question on the rights of the child, I was very supportive when that convention was being drafted of how significant it was because it had this new concept of the children having the right to participate in decisions affecting them and this was a major advance-not just to have a convention but to have that involvement in it-to have a committee on the rights of the child to listen to children as is strongly promoted by UNICEF and other organisations. I think it depends to some extent on leadership in all of those bodies whether the Convention will be given its full potential and there have been times when it has been wrong and times when it has been a bit disappointing. It is very much down to leadership personalities in the positions within the committee on the rights of the child and based in Geneva in the UNICEF itself, in major organisations that deal with children like Save the Children. I just think it's an incredibly strong convention. I regret very much that, as we know, two countries have not ratified the convention, Somalia and the United States. For the United States it is precisely that issue of a different philosophical approach to children, that parents have the responsibility and the role of decision-making, and that to give children the responsibility of being rights bearers and having a role in knowing the policies and measures that will affect them is quite culturally different and it is part of this American exceptionism that is at the root of it. The other reason which has gone now is that the convention requires that those who commit very serious offences under the age of 18 shouldn't suffer the death penalty but the United States Supreme Court has found it unconstitutional for somebody who committed that crime under the age of 18 to be put to death. So that specific problem has gone but I have talked to a lot of child rights people in the United States and they noted that in fact under the UN human rights indicators and the human development report, the United States does not come out well with child poverty, lack of access to education, although "every child left behind", this is working very well, etc. and yet the value of having a convention in civil society throughout the United States hasn't been effective precisely because there's this ingrained different approach to the role of parents and their responsibility and that children themselves are children and not rights bearers and I think this is the biggest hurdle. I think it's a great convention. I think leadership matters, especially leadership as it is very much a rights based convention that needs to be implemented in that way and we need more of that.

NEW SPEAKER:

Bill Campbell, project manager of the pan-disability organisation in Scotland called Inclusion Scotland. The first UN Convention of the 21st century has been a UN Convention on the rights of disabled people and to date to my knowledge only two European States have ratified it and none of the major powers of the world have ratified this convention yet. Do you have hopes that that may change in the coming months and years?

NEW SPEAKER:

Scottish Association for Mental Health. I was just wondering if there were any words of advice in terms of moving forward. It's one thing to perceive human rights in terms of the scandals and the outrages in other countries. How do we bring it closer to home for people of Scotland- to understand when people are denied service, when people have their rights abused on a daily basis. We've got that debate to have in Scotland and yet we're not even started yet. So I would be really interested to hear any words of advice.

MARY ROBINSON:

Two very good questions on two very important issues. Let me start with the human rights of people with disabilities. I got quite a culture shock when I took up the job of High Commissioner to find the human rights of people with disabilities weren't really a matter for the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights. They were the matter for one part-time commissioner who dealt with people with disabilities and reported every second year to the Human Rights Commission and the Commission on Sustainable Development and that was it. We got rid of that problem and I started the mapping out of the enormous discriminations and gaps, etc. and then we started the process of a convention and it has taken a good while, as you say, but at least now the convention has been passed. It is enormously important and it is important here in Scotland but in the developing world as well. I attended a pan- African conference for people with disabilities and the value to them of having an instrument of rights and being able to raise it at national level, trying to get legislation passed, but even more than that build capacity, build the facility, it's an enormous issue and it's very, very much a human rights issue. I know that foundations are seen as one of the areas where they would like to focus on support in the future, certainly in the United States, there is a major desire of foundations to fund access for people with disabilities to their legal entitlements and, using the convention, to try to standardise internationally. I think work done here in Scotland can be good practices too depending on how you perceive them. Certainly I think the fact that we have the Convention means that it's appropriate to learn from each other. It's appropriate we have a global standard, and now you know there's work to be done on that. That touches a little bit within issues of disabilities physical and intellectual, mental health is even more disadvantaged in many ways in many countries because whatever the possibility of tackling some issues of physical disabilities it's much harder to get issues of mental disabilities and mental health and I'm glad that you focused that question on Scotland because this morning when we were talking this issue came up and I am sure you may want to come in on this that I have been very impressed recently-I was in Belfast for the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement, which of course was what required that both Dublin and Belfast would establish Human Rights Commissions. You didn't have a Good Friday agreement to speed things up. You had to wait. If we hadn't had the Good Friday agreement believe me ... But after the high ceremony of that George Mitchell was there in his capacity as Chancellor of Queen's University and honorary degrees were given to Bertie Aherne and Tony Blair and there was interesting discussion at round tables, etc. but I was even more impressed in the sense that this was getting to what matters in human rights. When I went to a part of North Belfast where local communities are using the international human rights standards to basically address issues of local authority and one of the issues was mental health in the context of serious suicide risks, young people who had inflicted self-harm were in and then let out and they were supposed to have a follow up visit within a week. When they did a survey in the area, 90 per cent of the people had had no follow up, never mind within a week. They were insisting on addressing that issue by citing the international requirement and then coming down to the national law. Apart from helping the argument that it's an international standard, I found listening to these local North Belfast communities who had been working on rights and participation, they were enormously empowered. Another issue was the clearing of an area. The local community said no, we insist on being involved with that. A 16- year-old girl got up to speak for that group with PowerPoint and she said, "I wouldn't have believed how much it's changed me". She was changed because she had taken part in this kind of discussion and it was because of the empowerment, etc. As I sat there and listened to these North Belfast accents of very ordinary people and yes very dedicated people helping them to develop their capacity to participate in this way, I thought to myself that if this was happening in every community in every corner of the world we would have a very different world. It would be a different world anyway if we took seriously the Universal Declaration but what matters is your question, what is happening in relation to mental health, what's happening with disabilities, discrimination as there is here in Scotland and we have all of those issues and how do we engage and get communities to engage? The human rights community, if I can criticise my own community in that sense, have not done enough to engage in a practical way operationally. I know when I speak I may sound to be very remote in a way because a lot of work we do happens to be in African countries at the moment because that is where need is greater although the practical issues are the same in Glasgow, Scotland, Dublin, County Mayo. The good initiative in the west of Ireland in County Mayo is very simple, in a study supportive of those who had come into County Mayo from outside, high immigration, chaired by the Mayo inter-cultural association they looked at both migrants where they lived, the equality in some cases, the sort of places where they were staying which were way below standard of what they should have been staying in, but also the problems of the service providers that didn't get training, didn't get any extra support for a much bigger capacity load in certain areas. Ultimately real human rights work is addressing the nitty-gritty of how you remove barriers, deal with discrimination, how you empower those who are marginalised and have no sense of their dignity and worth. I would be very interested to see in your report on dignity how you flesh out that very important thing that dignity comes before rights, and it could be that at some stage it could be a very good subject for all the Human Rights Commissions to take on because in different countries in the world that sense of dignity may open up a very fruitful understanding of culture and identity and it might be very useful to be able to share that with each other.