Ten days before leaving office as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson has said there is an "unholy alliance" at the Earth Summit seeking to obstruct progress towards achieving key goals of sustainable development.
Speaking to The Irish Times yesterday, she said it was "terrible" that there was even an argument about the objective of halving the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015. She also complained that human rights were being "squeezed out" of the summit's text.
Asked which countries were to blame for this, Mrs Robinson said that she didn't want to be "typecast as US-bashing", but it was "sad" that stances taken by OPEC member-states on a number of crunch issues facing the summit were "so quickly endorsed by other significant quarters".
When it was put to her that she was referring to the JUSCANZ group - Japan, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - she shrugged and smiled knowingly. But she identified Ethiopia as "the hero of the conference" for breaking ranks with OPEC on the issues of trade and environmental protection.
"Ethiopia's stand was a wonderful exercise in human democracy," she declared. What it had done, late on Sunday night, was to lead the charge against a section of the draft text that could have given the World Trade Organisation an effective veto on the environment.
She said it would be "very worrying" if delegates representing more than 180 countries at the summit went home from Johannesburg without having agreed to targets and timetables that would "make a difference to people's lives". Mrs Robinson has been at the summit since last Thursday, when she addressed a plenary session before embarking on a series of round-table discussions and bilateral meetings with human rights, environment and development groups as well as a number of political leaders.
As she sees it, the summit is operating at two levels. "At the inter-governmental level, it is not good. But everywhere else, among civil society and NGO [non-governmental organisation] representatives, there is a lot more honesty and directness about the issues," she said.
Though human rights had not featured in the programme adopted at the first Rio Summit 10 years ago, Mrs Robinson said she was "very pleased with the clear language" of the draft political declaration here, even if it was "not being well-guarded" in this summit's action plan.
She also welcomed the "real linkages" that had emerged since Rio de Janeiro between environment, development and human rights NGOs because they all shared a commitment to advancing people's rights to food, health, clean water and participation in the decision-making process.
Also since Rio, there had been a developing body of international law that people could draw upon to advance sustainable development in their own countries by reminding governments of the commitments they had made in various treaties that were "highly relevant to human rights", Mrs Robinson said.
- The chairman of the Green Party, Mr John Gormley TD, said yesterday that the summit was heading for failure. "All in all, there is general disillusionment among the NGO community in Johannesburg."