An independent Human Rights Commission for Northern Ireland must tackle the issues of equality and rights if it is to redress the conflict between the communities, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, said in London last night.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was a useful example of "revisiting the pain of the past" and enabled participants to chart a route to a more secure and inclusive future by applying the philosophy of freedom, justice and peace. Similarly, by placing human rights at the heart of the peace process in Northern Ireland, both governments had signalled their intention that addressing human rights concerns was an effective tool in resolving conflict.
Mrs Robinson was speaking as part of the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the International Maritime Organisation. In her address, "The Mortal Power of Affirmation", she said the human rights community and the United Nations would ultimately be judged by those in a precarious position "at the margins", where success would be measured by a demonstrable change in people's lives.
"Dignity and respect constitute the ethic. Freedom from fear of death, violence and wrongful imprisonment and access to health, shelter, food, education and employment: these represent its delivery," she said. The United Nations would learn from changes that had promoted better human rights safeguards and would incorporate those lessons into its own practices.
"The constituencies of the excluded look to us for support and protection. We dare not fail them, least of all by failure to attend to our own inadequacies," she continued.
In the intervening years since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mrs Robinson said the world had witnessed many destructive events. The magnitude of these events, the numbers of deaths and the manner in which they had taken place "take us to the limit of human imagination." However, the Declaration of Human Rights had affirmed the "centrality" of human rights and the next millennium must see governments and the human rights community apply the standard of human rights more effectively.
For that to happen, the universality and interdependence of all human rights must be reinforced. She praised the Chinese government for signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, saying the decision represented a "significant advance". She acknowledged that the spread of a rights-based culture remained "skewed" and that for many states, both in the developed and the developing world, human rights responses were "inadequate or non-existent. Mrs Robinson said states must foster the belief within corporations and business life that a rights-based approach made economic sense.