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interesting
do as I say not do as i do !!
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Headline: US finds strange bedfellows in UN vote on torture
Byline: Peter Ford Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 04/19/2002
(PARIS)The United States has aligned itself with some of its fiercest and
least democratic enemies in opposing efforts to strengthen an
international treaty that outlaws torture, according to diplomatic
sources.
Washington has found itself on the same side as Cuba, Libya, and Syria,
among other states, in trying to block a proposal before the United
Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva designed to give more teeth
to the Convention Against Torture.
US diplomats insist they are not opposed to beefing up the 1987 UN
convention, to which Washington is a party, but say they disagree with
the international prison-inspection regime being proposed by their
Latin American and European allies.
Human rights activists, however, are disappointed with the US stand.
"It's pretty scandalous that some states claiming to defend human
rights are blocking this," says Mark Thomson, secretary general of the
Geneva-based non-governmental Association to Prevent Torture. "If they
succeed, it's really putting a spanner in the works in terms of
implementing the convention in a meaningful way."
The new protocol to the Convention Against Torture, which is due to
come to a vote today, would establish national and international
inspectorates to ensure that prisoners are not being tortured, through
visits to places of detention.
Washington has opposed the idea since it was first raised 10 years ago,
arguing that the fourth amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting
"unreasonable searches and seizures" meant it could not allow foreign
prison inspectors to go where they pleased. "As a matter of principle,
unrestricted authority granted to a visiting mechanism is incompatible
with the need for checks and balances" argues Steve Solomon, head of
the US delegation.
European negotiators say they have no quarrel with US constitutional
reservations, but do not understand why Washington has tried so hard to
convince other countries not to sign the protocol.
"The American arguments are fine for America, but we are disappointed
that they have lobbied as hard as they have against adoption," says one
European diplomat.
US negotiators have found their influence over other governments
limited by the fact that the US is not currently a member of the UN
Human Rights Commission, having been voted off the 53-member body last
year. But they have played a vocal and active role on the working group
concerned with the torture protocol, which is open to all UN members.
The US has proposed a weaker inspection mechanism by which inspectors
would be sent to a country only through arranged visits at the
individual government's request to discuss ways to prevent torture.
Proponents of stronger mechanisms say the US idea would water down
implementation to meaningless levels.
"We have already compromised on the issue of ad hoc, surprise visits,
which the protocol won't allow," says the European diplomat. "This text
is as low as we can go."
When the protocol comes up for a vote at the commission, probably
today, India, Syria, Libya, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia are expected to vote
against it. But 25 countries are cosponsoring it, just two votes short
of the majority needed, so both supporters and opponents expect the
protocol to pass.
It will then be presented to the UN Economic and Social Committee in
New York, and later go before the UN General Assembly. If the General
Assembly adopts the protocol, it will recommend that member states
ratify it.
(c) Copyright 2002 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
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