A human rights office will shortly be set up in Chechnya to take testimonies about human rights abuses and prepare reports, according to the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
Mr Alvaro Gil-Robles was addressing a two-day conference on human rights in Dublin Castle yesterday. It was hosted by the Government as part of its activities during the Irish presidency of the council.
Mr Gil-Robles, who took up his position last October, is the first person to hold the newly created post in the council. He told the conference his role was essentially a political rather than a juridical one - he would not deal with individual cases, as these were dealt with by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The first problem he was confronted with was the "hot potato" of Chechnya, he said. He visited Moscow and Ingushetia last November, where he saw Chechen refugees in refugee camps. Conditions there were terrible.
Last month he visited the region again, including Grozny. He had obtained the agreement of the Russian government to set up a human rights office there, and he told the conference he thought that the Russian government would also agree to medical assistance from the Red Cross.
The human rights office will be staffed by officials from the council and the Russian government, and will take complaints, act as mediator and draw up files on alleged abuses.
Opening the conference yesterday the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, urged the Russian government to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the reports of civilian killings and human rights abuses, and bring those responsible to justice. He said the Council of Europe was ready to assist Russia in every possible way to establish lasting peace in Chechnya.
Referring to the setting up of a Human Rights Commission in this state, as agreed in the Belfast Agreement, he said the legislation on this was currently before the Dail.
"Once established, the Human Rights Commission will also work closely with the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission through a joint committee comprising members of the two bodies. One of its first tasks will be to draft a Charter of Rights for all the people of this island."
Prof Conor Gearty of King's College, London, told the conference that human rights are a way of empowering the political process rather than a substitute for it.
The best way to achieve social and economic rights was through legislation on the allocation of resources, he said. In general this was to be preferred to general statements in the Constitution which might not mean much in practice.
Prof Gearty said that a single model of human rights machinery might not be applicable in all circumstances. "The more popular the language of rights, the less certain its meaning," he said.
The idea of human rights sprang from an intuition about the human person, about seeing people as people, not as commodities or as animals or less than animals. But on its own it was vacuous. "There is a need to connect that intuition with various dynamic parts of our society," he said.
The idea of human rights could be put in absolutely uncompromising terms, based on an idea of the rational person achieving rational solutions. But the reality was messier. This meant that in the 19th century some people thought the idea of human rights was absurd. Political thinkers like Bentham and Marx, who were critical of the abstract idea of human rights, taught us the importance of complementing human rights with other ideas of representativity and social context.
"The commitment to the idea of social and economic rights is a legacy of that insight," he said.
While "human rights talk" should not substitute for the political process, the language of rights might be a way, in a malfunctioning nation, of managing a fractured society, he said.