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Racial Discrimination and Related Intolerance
We are served refreshment only in separate cups at roadside tea stalls,
turned away from public swimming pools, stopped on highways as
presumptive criminals, trafficked as prostitutes, denied our mother s
nationality, classed willy-nilly as "mentally disabled" in schools, and
abducted into slavery.
We are denied housing or burned out of our homes, refused fresh water
from village wells, barred from employment or forced to perform
degrading labor, and driven out of out of our communities or even our
countries by terror.
We face beatings, sexual assault, wrongful arrest, or murder on a daily
basis. In lieu of the birthright of equality we are marked from birth
with the brand of discriminatory treatment.
These words are the distillation of testimony received by Human Rights
Watch that reflect the reality of racism as a global ill. This is the
experience of countless millions who are victims of racial
discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance on a daily basis.
They include minorities around the world--and some majority populations
too, even in the post-apartheid era. They have in common their humanity
and the denial of full equality by reason of their birth. They are the
victims of the politics of exclusion, stigmatization, and
scapegoating--or of targeted neglect and social invisibility.
The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination (CERD) defines "racial discrimination" broadly and
concretely. Adopted in 1965, its definition of racial discrimination
includes "any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on
race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose
or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or
exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms
in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of
public life."
The reality of racism does not turn only on the definition of the groups
that are oppressed, or on the much disputed concept of race itself, but
may be driven largely by the perceptions of the oppressor. Racism
blights the lives of groups defined primarily by ethnicity, caste, or an
identity shaped by religion. Unlike class or other indicators of social
status, these are attributes by which people are instantly identified
and which can not readily be shed. Even if the very idea of race is
discounted, racism is a very real and deadly phenomenon.
The convention on racial discrimination requires states to guarantee to
all individuals the enjoyment of rights without such discrimination--and
to ensure that public policies are discriminatory neither in purpose nor
in effect. In many countries, the discriminatory effect of public
policy, regardless of its intent, serves to lock people away from the
exercise of civil and political rights--and by doing so bars their way
to the enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights.
International action to combat racism has long been on the agenda of the
United Nations and regional intergovernmental bodies, as well as the
object of campaigning by a vast constellation of nongovernmental
organizations. The apartheid regime in South Africa was a focus of much
of this international effort, particularly after the dismantling of
legal segregation in the United States and the gradual efforts to remedy
its consequences. The end of apartheid in 1994 was a landmark in this
struggle, but the challenge remained. Just one month before Nelson
Mandela s May 9, 1994, election to the South African presidency, Hutu
extremists launched a campaign of genocide against the Tutsi minority in
Rwanda.
Racism and intolerance in Africa s Great Lakes region and elsewhere
persisted in many forms even where the basis of "otherness" itself was
clouded. The Hutu-Tutsi divide in Rwanda and neighboring states was
itself founded on a blurring over time of social strata into something
approximating ethnicity. The so-called "ethnic cleansing" of the former
Yugoslavia, in turn, was driven by a racism defined by ethnicity,
religion, language, and national origin. In the year 2000, millions
faced violence, internal displacement, the arbitrary loss of their
nationality, or expulsion from their countries by reason of their
descent. Millions more faced pervasive racism that was less apparent to
the casual observer--but was in its effect often no less pernicious.
Human Rights Watch in 2000 brought a new focus to the issue of racial
discrimination as it affects migrants and refugees and populations
identified by caste. The organization s work concentrated on the
discriminatory impact of state policy and practice in two areas. These
were discrimination in the determination of nationality and citizenship
rights, and discrimination in criminal justice and in the public
administration of state institutions, services, and resources. These
issues are discussed further below.
The World Conference Against Racism
The Third World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia and Related Intolerance will be held in South Africa from
August 31 to September 7, 2001. The conference will be the first forum
of its kind since the end of apartheid in South Africa (previous world
conferences were held in 1978 and 1983). As such, it can build upon the
lessons learned in abolishing the apartheid system, while addressing the
racist effect of other policies and practices that continue to afflict
whole populations. Its convening reflects both the achievements of the
international community and the ongoing challenges it faced in
combatting racism. It should celebrate the end of apartheid--but there
will be little else to celebrate unless the conference itself catalyzes
real introspection by participating governments and real mechanisms for
change.
With the end of apartheid, there was some concern that in this third
conference the continuing challenge of racism would be portrayed by
governments as largely a matter of education, control, and punishment of
ordinary people--to confront racism which was in some way inherent,
spontaneous, and natural. There seemed a real risk that the
international community would focus first on treating racism as a social
disease, its vectors of transmission the ordinary citizen, private
groups, and unscrupulous Internet service providers. In initial planning
sessions, the role of governments and government officials at all
levels, from education ministries to community police, in imposing and
enforcing policies with racist effect went largely unvoiced. Rather,
governments vied to hold themselves up as exemplars in identifying "best
practices" in eliminating overt racism from public policy and private
practice and in their pedagogic efforts to preach tolerance. The
identification and remedying of the racist effect of government policies
and practices where racist intent was not clearly present were largely
off the agenda.
The preparations for the World Conference were undertaken by governments
and civil society alike. Early consultations generated new
nongovernmental alliances, bringing together legal reform groups,
advocates for migrants and refugees, women s rights activists,
faith-based organizations, civil rights activists and human rights
groups, veteran campaigners of the anti-apartheid movement, a wide
spectrum of minority rights groups, and other grass-roots activists.
These nongovernmental organizations have already organized scores of
consultative meetings in many countries, while participating in the
preparatory meetings, expert seminars, and regional conferences of the
United Nations formal program. The consultative meetings and the expert
seminars have already made a significant contribution to the substance
of the World Conference and should go some way toward encouraging
government representatives to take seriously their responsibilities to
combat racism.
The Preparatory Committee for the World Conference identified five broad
themes for the provisional agenda of the conference at its first session
in May 2000. These were the sources, causes, forms, and contemporary
manifestations of racism; the victims; measures of prevention, education
and protection; the provision of effective remedies; and strategies to
achieve full and effective equality. In some of these areas considerable
dissent was registered by powerful governments. Two governments of
countries in which caste was the focus of discriminatory
treatment--India and Japan--called for the exclusion of descent-based
caste discrimination from the deliberations. Despite India s massive
lobbying effort toward exclusion of victims of caste discrimination,
however, there was an apparent consensus that the conference would be
inclusive in its identification of the victims of racism and related
intolerance.
The real break in consensus emerged on the matter of remedies. A draft
slate of themes prepared by the African Group of delegates had been
broadly acceptable, apart from its fourth thematic point, the question
of remedies. Dissent turned primarily on the reference to compensation,
with former European colonial powers and the United States adamantly
opposed to language that implied their acknowledgment of material
obligations to remedy past abuses. This was an echo of debates within
the United States on the issue of reparations to address the heritage of
slavery and segregation, a context that had led the drafters to choose
the less politically charged term "compensatory measures." The
dissenters may also have reacted negatively to the recommendation of a
U.N. expert seminar on the remedies available to victims, held in
preparation for the World Conference in February, on the centrality of
"reparations": "Victims of racial discrimination are entitled to
reparation in its different forms, such as restitution, compensation,
rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition. Monetary
and non-monetary forms of reparation are equally important in rendering
justice to victims of racial discrimination. Non-monetary forms of
reparation include measures such as verification of the facts and their
public disclosure; official declarations or judicial decisions that
restore dignity and rebuild reputation; acknowledgment of the facts and
acceptance of responsibility; and the commemoration and the payment of
tribute to the victims."
A late-night compromise placed the word "compensatory" in brackets: "The
provision of effective remedies, recourse, redress, [compensatory] and
other measures at the national, regional and international level,"
annotated by a series of explanatory statements from delegates. The
Western Group reserved the right to "revisit this point." The African
delegates declared their intent to support the inclusion of reference to
compensatory measures as founded in general principles of international
human rights law establishing the right to restitution, compensation,
and rehabilitation for victims of grave violations of human rights.
The agenda of the World Conference will be discussed further at a
special inter-sessional meeting to be held in January 2001 and finalized
at the second session of the Preparatory Committee to be held in Geneva
in May-June 2001. Regional conferences are to be held in Santiago, Chile
(the Americas meeting, in December 2000), in Tehran, Iran (the Asia
meeting, to include part of the Middle East, in February 2001), in
Dakar, Senegal (the Africa meeting, in January 2001). The European
regional meeting was held in Strasbourg, France, in October. Expert
seminars were held on the protection of minorities and other vulnerable
groups (Warsaw, Poland, in July); on migrants and trafficking in
persons, with particular reference to women and children (Bangkok,
Thailand, in September), and on preventing ethnic and racial conflicts
(Addis-Ababa, Ethiopia, in October). In November a seminar on race and
gender is to be held in Zagreb, Croatia.
Nationals Without Nationality
In many parts of the world people were denied citizenship and
corresponding civil rights in their own countries, or stripped of
citizenship, solely because of their race or national descent. In some
cases this applied to populations that had been present in a country for
generations, often predating their country s independence. In others,
children born in their mother s country were denied that nationality
because women could not transmit their nationality, rendering the
children potentially stateless on gender grounds, or forced to take the
nationality of a non-national father.
Denial or removal of the rights of citizenship could be a means
comprehensively to deny a population a broad range of human rights. The
issue was most dramatic as it concerned children s rights to a
nationality and to the full exercise of human rights. Children denied
citizenship in their own country were often denied a right to education,
to social services, to many areas of employment as they reached
adulthood, or even to documents establishing their identity. In some
cases, governments informally recognized members of particular national
minorities as distinct from foreigners--as in the case of Syria s large
Kurdish minority, hundreds of thousands of members of Thailand s hill
tribes, or Kuwait s Bidun--while according them a restrictive status
short of full recognition as nationals: as if citizens without
citizenship. Democratic participation in the regulation of their own
community s affairs was impossible for this disenfranchised population.
International conventions on statelessness were inadequate to address
this denial of citizenship rights on national or racial grounds.
Arbitrary deprivation of citizenship and disputed nationality was both a
cause and consequence of forcible displacement of certain populations,
and proved to be a significant obstacle in seeking solutions to
long-standing refugee situations. In South Asia, for example, more than
100,000 Bhutanese refugees remained in exile, the majority of them in
southeast Nepal, after most of them were arbitrarily stripped of their
nationality and expelled from Bhutan in the early 1990s. Ten years
later, the Bhutanese government continued to block refugee return,
claiming that the majority of them were not bona fide Bhutanese citizens
and hence enjoyed no right to return.
Naturalization policies, by which non-nationals received citizenship,
were often wholly or largely founded on discriminatory grounds. Denial
was often the norm even for people with deep roots in a country who
retained no connections with any other. In many regions, changing
patterns of migration and catastrophic movements of refugees fleeing war
or ethnic persecution had long moved large populations in an ebb and
flow across national boundaries. Over decades these population movements
resulted in large populations putting down new roots in countries to
which they were relative newcomers, but who had no other country to
which to return. The children of these upheavals were the most
vulnerable to discriminatory nationality policies and practices.
In the Middle East, statelessness most frequently stemmed from the
deprivation of nationality, often as a result of conflict over the
composition of a state and its borders. A situation of citizens without
citizenship also derived from the failure to establish nationality at
crucial junctures during the process of state formation, or the
redefinition of the terms of nationality that sometimes accompanied or
followed international armed conflict. The denial of citizenship was
exacerbated by the persistence of nationality laws that typically made
it difficult for foreigners to gain nationality, even when an individual
was born in a country or resident there for many years; prevented women
nationals from passing their nationality to their children; and
prohibited dual nationality. Taken together, these factors produced
large populations whose statelessness was inherited, and often
restricted their opportunity to vote, work, register marriage, births,
and deaths, own or inherit property, receive government health and
educational benefits, or travel.
The problem of statelessness for Palestinian refugees in host countries
in the region, Syrian-born Kurds, and Bidun in Kuwait and Bahrain was
largely unaddressed or addressed in unsatisfactory ways. In a report
published in October 2000, Human Rights Watch criticized Kuwait s
treatment of its 120,000 Bidun residents, many of whom have lived in
Kuwait for decades or generations and who should be eligible for
naturalization but have not been granted it. Since the mid-1980s, they
have faced widespread and systematic discrimination, including
violations of their right to enter and leave Kuwait, to marry and found
a family, and to work. Their children s right to education, to be
registered immediately after birth, and to acquire a nationality are
also violated. The government of Iraq continued to force Kurds and other
minorities out of the Kirkuk region and into the three northern
autonomous governorates.
Particular calamities occurred when governments stripped whole ethnic or
racial groups of their recognized nationality, most commonly in
situations of upheaval or when new states emerged. Ethiopia summarily
denationalized and expelled some seventy thousand Ethiopian citizens of
Eritrean origin from their country by early 2000, after war broke out
with Eritrea. Governments--and opposition groups--also seized upon the
denial of citizenship to particular groups to further political aims in
the absence of crisis, and in doing so sowed new crises. In the Ivory
Coast, ethnic politics became a center-piece of political discourse, the
questioning by high officials of who was a "true Ivorian" leading to
intercommunal violence. In Cambodia, members of the ethnic Vietnamese
minority faced a new wave of repression in November 1999, when
authorities charged that some 600 ethnic Vietnamese residents of a
floating village were illegal immigrants. The villagers were long-time
Cambodian citizens, according to statements to human rights workers, and
they said that local authorities confiscated their identity documents
before they were forced to flee to a location near the Vietnamese
border. Discriminatory nationality and citizenship policies and
practices in these circumstances were frequently accompanied by racist
violence. (See Cambodia.)
There was some good news. On August 29, the Thai cabinet granted
citizenship to the descendants of three groups of displaced persons:
Burmese who entered the country prior to March 1976, Nepalese migrants,
and Chinese migrants who had migrated to Thailand since the 1960s.
Members of other groups, including Thailand s ethnic minority hilltribes
however, remained without a nationality or full citizenship rights.
Around 300,000 such people registered with the government were permitted
to reside and work in the country but faced restrictions on their
movement, could not participate in elections, and could not own land.
Hundreds of thousands of other hilltribe villagers remained unregistered
and were officially considered as illegal immigrants. In a potentially
important reform, the Thai government in May 2000 delegated
decision-making on the citizenship of hilltribe children born in
Thailand to district chiefs. (See Thailand.)
Migrants and Refugees
The preparations for the World Conference come in a climate of
increasing xenophobia and racism in many world regions from which
governments have not stood aloof. As economic globalization, regional
economic crises, and political upheaval have stimulated movement of
people across national borders, migrants and refugees in particular have
been assailed by new measures of discrimination on an enormous scale.
Migration and refugee policies are increasingly driven by xenophobic and
racist attitudes. The open expression of racist views by politicians and
through the media increasingly threatens the protection of refugees and
migrants worldwide, with many governments indicating a greater interest
in erecting barriers and keeping people out than in providing
protection.
In Western Europe, the weakening of the refugee protection regime has
been accompanied by both subtle and blatant forms of racist and
xenophobic rhetoric. Asylum seekers and migrants--and by extension
members of minorities in general--have been branded as criminals and job
usurpers. This scapegoating provided tools for political mobilization by
nationalist parties and even by some in the mainstream. The physical and
psychological abuse of migrant workers is fueled by this racist
rhetoric--and by impunity for such abuse. Women migrant domestic workers
who are sexually assaulted are discouraged from seeking legal redress
for sexual violence for fear of immediate detention and summary
deportation. Racist abuse by private citizens, as the police stand by,
is paralleled by a disturbing trend toward racist violence by the
police. Some of the countries of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East that
have traditionally hosted the vast majority of the world s refugees
cited Western European precedents in justifying their adoption of
similar restrictions, while mostly continuing to provide generous refuge
to the bulk of the world s refugees.
Several U.N. bodies criticized Australia s treatment of refugees--and of
its aboriginal minority--in 2000, prompting a harsh rejoinder from that
country s government. In the Pacific, ethnic tensions rooted in
longstanding social and economic grievances and a perception on the part
of indigenous elites of dispossession by migrants or their descendants,
led to a coup in Fiji in May and an attempted coup in the Solomon
Islands in June.
Trends in human population movements and toward an increasingly
international labor force make it particularly urgent to address racism
as a factor in the generation of and response to migration and refugee
flows, and in its relation to international and domestic conflict. Women
migrants and girls suffered in particular, through trafficking and
forced prostitution, from their lack of protection in the work place,
and in constraints on family life imposed by migration and the specter
of statelessness. Xenophobia, often whipped up by political or religious
leaders, served to stimulate discriminatory treatment involving ever
greater violence.
Foreign workers were violently attacked in Libya, where hundreds of
thousands of Africans reportedly migrated over the past several years in
search of work. Some fifty Chadian and Sudanese migrants were reported
killed in clashes between Africans and Libyans near Tripoli in
September. Thousands of other migrant workers reportedly fled the
country as a consequence of the attacks.
The movement of refugees, migrants, and victims of trafficking was a
major issue in Asia, with protection inevitably requiring
intergovernmental cooperation. To combat trafficking of Thai women to
Japan, for example, both the Thai and Japanese governments needed to
reform legislation and crack down on corruption of police and
immigration officials. To protect foreign migrant workers against abuse
in Malaysia or Korea, countries exporting labor needed to prosecute
illegal labor recruiters while the receiving countries needed to step up
investigations and prosecutions of abusive employers.
Racist Impact: Criminal Justice and Public Administration
A key to the fight against discrimination was to monitor public policy
which, through state action or inaction, discriminated in effect. To
this end Human Rights Watch urged states to introduce transparency in
governmental practices and monitor the potentially discriminatory effect
of policies and practices on people within their jurisdiction. In
addition to obstacles to political participation by citizens, the area
of criminal justice had a particular potential for discriminatory
effect, and at the national or local level involved practices--like
racial profiling, in which one s race was the determining factor in
falling under suspicion--with racist intent. Broader areas of public
administration, notably the regulation of public health, housing,
employment, and education, also required scrutiny, as alternatively
constituting gateways or insuperable obstacles to the enjoyment of
fundamental rights. The potential for public policies or practices to
have unequal and negative consequences for particular groups required
particular scrutiny.
The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in its
General Recommendation on article 1, paragraph 1 of CERD, concluded that
the convention obliges states "to nullify any law or practice which has
the effect of creating or perpetuating racial discrimination." (Emphasis
added.) As a consequence, it declared that in considering whether
differentiation of treatment constituted discrimination, "it will look
to see whether that action has an unjustifiable disparate impact upon a
group distinguished by race, color, descent, or national or ethnic
origin." (Emphasis added.) Such policies or practices could be expressly
racist, or, while appearing race neutral, reflect a malign neglect, a
refusal to take needed actions to secure equal treatment of all racial
and ethnic groups. Minorities in Turkey, for example, were statistically
invisible as a matter of public policy: the very existence of a Kurdish
minority was denied by the state and reporting on the deprivation of
this minority s rights is criminally sanctioned.
In many societies, racism was most evident in the area of criminal
justice; in the administration of social services, education, and public
housing; and even in restrictions of freedom of movement and the right
to live in a particular area of one s own country. In the states of the
former USSR, control of movement and residence continued to be exercised
at the national, provincial, or municipal level. In Russia, the
enforcement of these restrictions often assumed ethnic or racial
dimensions, while implementation of residency controls through the
propiska system of permits served as a pretext for the police
harassment, arbitrary arrest, and extortion of people distinguished by
their racial characteristics. Moscow police in September 1999 were given
carte blanche in the wake of two bombing incidents there to carry out
mass arrests of ethnic Chechens living in the city, taking more than
twenty thousand Chechens to police stations. Administrative measures
kept Chechen children out of school, while adults had trouble finding
work, registering marriages, or receiving passports. (See Russia.)
In the United States, racial discrimination in the criminal justice
system was increasingly the object of concern--problems the United
States went some way to address in submitting its initial report to the
United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in
September (as required as a party to CERD). The report, although five
years late, frankly acknowledged dramatically disproportionate
incarceration rates for minorities in the criminal justice system and
cited studies indicating that members of minority groups, especially
blacks and Hispanics, "may be disproportionately subject to adverse
treatment throughout the criminal justice process." It further
acknowledged concerns that "incidents of police brutality seem to target
disproportionately individuals belonging to racial or ethnic
minorities." The report, however, did not question whether ostensibly
race-neutral criminal laws or law enforcement practices causing the
incarceration disparities violated CERD, nor did it acknowledge the
federal government s obligation, under CERD, to ensure that state
criminal justice systems (which account for 90 percent of the
incarcerated population) are free of racial discrimination.
Criminal justice policies in the United States permanently stripped many
of its nationals of fundamental civil rights in a manner
disproportionately affecting minorities. A growing number of citizens
were unable to vote because of laws that disenfranchise people convicted
of felonies who are in prison, on probation, or on parole--and even, in
one quarter of the states, who have finished serving their sentences. An
estimated 3.9 million U.S. citizens were disenfranchised, including over
one million who had fully completed their sentences. Black Americans
were particularly hard hit by disenfranchisement laws: 13 percent of
black men--1.4 million--were disenfranchised. In two states, almost one
in three black men was unable to vote because of a felony conviction.
(See United States.)
Discrimination in criminal justice and public policy was perhaps most
pervasive and deep rooted where discrimination was founded on caste, or,
as in the United States, where the heritage of slavery and legislated
segregation remained potent factors. This sometimes embraced hidden
forms of racism that had extraordinary rights-defeating consequences. In
India, the emancipation by law of members of castes once known as
"untouchables"--and now known as Dalits--failed to eliminate the norms
and structures of India s hidden apartheid. De facto segregation
continued to be enforced by government authority ranging from the police
and lower courts to state and municipal officials. There are more than
160 million Dalits in India and tens of millions of others with similar
caste distinctions in other South Asian countries.
The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
raised concerns about the caste system during its February review of
India s initial report under the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women. The committee expressed concern
over extreme forms of physical and sexual violence against women
belonging to particular castes or ethnic or religious groups India. The
U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, in turn, concluded in January
that the caste system was an obstacle to children s human rights. In
Japan, the minority caste known as Burakumin also faced discriminatory
treatment, despite the Burakumins de jure equality. The Committee on
the Elimination of Racial Discrimination ruled authoritatively in 1996
that the situation of India s scheduled castes, which were based on
descent, fell within the scope of the convention. (See India.)
The de facto segregation of the Roma minority in many nations of Eastern
Europe became increasingly visible as European political institutions
raised ongoing discriminatory treatment there as a major obstacle to
European integration. Harassment and violent attacks against Roma were
reported in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania,
Serbia, and Slovakia, and expulsion from homes and communities was
widely reported. Roma children often lacked access to schools in
Croatia, and in the Czech Republic they were disproportionately shunted
into classes for the mentally disabled. In Serbia, Croatia, Hungary--and
in the European Union in Greece--municipal authorities forced Roma out
of their homes. In Bulgaria, residents in a neighborhood of Burgas
signed a petition on November 4, 1999, calling for the expulsion of Roma
and the demolition of Roma houses; villagers in Mechka made Roma
scapegoats for a crime committed in April, refusing to allow Roma in
public places and threatening them with expulsion from the town. In
Serbia, Roma in Sabac were turned away from a public swimming pool. In
Slovakia, the head of the National Labor Office in November 1999
defended the office s policy of marking files of persons regarded as
Roma with the letter "R" which he said reflected the "complicated social
adaptability" of the group. The denial of nationality to Roma was also
an issue in recent years in the Czech and Slovak Republics, but had been
addressed by legislative reform.
The Work of Human Rights Watch
The focus of Human Rights Watch in the lead up to the 2001 conference
was upon four neglected areas in which the racist effect of government
policies and practices vitiated the rights of huge sectors of humanity.
They included an emphasis on issues concerning two groups which required
particular protection--migrants and refugees, who in their tens of
millions were increasingly vulnerable as a consequence of globalization
and political upheaval; and the possibly hundreds of millions of
individuals who were oppressed by reason of caste. In both cases, a
particular emphasis was made on the double discrimination faced by women
who were victimized both by reason of their origins and their gender.
The focus was also on policies and practices regarding nationality and
racial discrimination in criminal justice and public administration.
Human Rights Watch took part in regular briefings of national and
international bodies regarding its findings and recommendations
regarding situations of racial discrimination. In August, in response to
a NGO briefing organized by the International Dalit Solidarity
Network--of which Human Rights Watch is a member--the U.N.
Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights passed
without a vote a resolution on "discrimination on the basis of work and
descent." The resolution was aimed at addressing the plight of Dalits.
Human Rights Watch delegates participated in May in the first session of
the Preparatory Committee for the World Conference, in Geneva, and took
part in the European conference in Strasbourg in October, the first of
the five regional conferences to be held. Human Rights Watch had also
participated in a series of United States regional meetings of
nongovernmental organizations to plan activities around the World
Conference. Human Rights Watch presented a paper to the European
conference jointly with the European Council on Refugees and Exiles
(ECRE) concerning the human rights of refugees and migrants, in a
critique of the draft General Conclusions of the European Conference
Against Racism.
Human Rights Watch explored practical measures behind which to mobilize
international action to address these issues during and beyond the World
Conference, including:
A call to end the deprivation of citizenship on racial and related
grounds, including their intersection with gender. International
agreements on statelessness should be ratified as a matter of priority;
but these standards alone are inadequate to eliminate this widespread
and devastating form of discrimination;
A call to develop an international program of action to make caste- or
other descent-based segregation, violence, and abuse as intolerable as
apartheid;
A call to ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the
Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families as a measure
of protection against discriminatory treatment; to apply international
refugee law to refugees without discrimination; and to improve
international monitoring by which to detect and remedy discriminatory
treatment of migrants and refugees.
A call for states to systematically collect and report information on
law enforcement and the administration of justice, including juvenile
justice, as it concerns different population groups, with a view to
identifying and remedying any discriminatory purpose or effect;
A call for states to monitor the administration of public affairs in
such areas as education, health care, housing, and the enforcement of
labor rights, in order to identify and remedy any discriminatory purpose
or effect in public policy and programs.
Relevant Human Rights Watch
Reports:
Bosnia and Hercegovina: Unfinished Business: Return of Displaced Persons
and Other Human Rights Issues in Bijeljina, 5/00
Burma/Bangladesh: Burmese Refugees in Bangladesh: Still No Durable
Solution, 5/00
Burundi: Neglecting Justice in Making Peace, 4/00
Burundi: Emptying the Hills: Regroupment Camps in Burundi, 7/00
China: Tibet Since 1950: Silence Prison or Exile, 5/00
Democratic Republic of the Congo: Eastern Congo Ravaged: Killing
Civilians and Silencing Protest, 5/00
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Kosovo: Rape As A Weapon of "Ethnic
Cleansing," 3/00
Japan: Owed Justice: Thai Women Trafficked into Debt Bondage in Japan,
9/00
Kuwait: Promises Betrayed: Denial of Rights of Bidun, Women, and Freedom
of Expression, 10/00
Malaysia/Burma: Living in Limbo: Burmese Rohingyas in Malaysia, 8/00
Russia/Chechnya: "No Happiness Remains:" Civilian Killings, Pillage, and
Rape in Alkhan-yurt, Chechnya, 3/00
Russia/Chechnya: February 5: A Day of Slaughter in Novye Aldi, 6/00
Rwanda: The Search for Security and Human Rights Abuses, 4/00
Turkey: Human Rights and the European Union Accession Partnership, 9/00
United States: Fingers to the Bone:United States Failure to Protect
Child Farmworkers, 6/00
United States: No Minor Matter: Children in Maryland s Jails, 11/99
United States: Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War
on Drugs, 5/00
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