FED: US an exception to demand for human rights Robertson

AAP General News (Australia)
12-09-1998
FED: US an exception to demand for human rights Robertson

By Debra Way

CANBERRA, Dec 9 AAP - The US was a tragic exception to the international human rights
movement, planning to put to death nearly as many people as had died under Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson said today.

Mr Robertson told a National Press Club luncheon that there was cause for optimism in human
rights as the world headed into a new millennium, but that this must be tempered by the
dreadful failures of the past.

"(These include) the utter failure of the United Nations, with all that high level
rhetoric, with its bureaucratic and at times corrupt machinery who implement the policies of
the universal declaration," he said.

"Thats why I see the real hope outside the United Nations, in the pressure that a mass
peoples movement can put on governments."

China remained a problem in terms of human rights but had made a start this year when it
signed the civil and political communique, he said.

"And then, of course, theres America ... which refused to approve the landmines
convention last year, and voted this year, along with Libya and Saudi Arabia, against an
international criminal court.

"This is a country which plans to kill almost as many people as General Pinochet, namely
the 3,512 men and women on death row currently in 41 of its states.

"It remains a great super power with pretensions to police the world, a tragic exception to
the demand for universal human rights."

In the new millennium the human rights movement would have to take more seriously the
economic and social rights in the universal declaration.

"Civil rights and political rights may be more fundamental but they cant be enjoyed on an
empty stomach," he said.

"Talk to your holocaust survivors and they tell you race, hate and slavery werent their
main concern in the camps, it was just an aching and all pervasive hunger."

Mr Robertson said the international community had a chance to take stock of its human
rights obligations as the world headed into a new century and a new millennium.

"We are, after all, at the fag end of a century in which 160 million human lives have been
lost, wasted by war, by genocide, by torture," he said.

"The best we can do to remember those whom weve failed by our pledgings because we failed
to take them seriously, is to determine that in the future were going to make things stick."

Mr Robertson, a human rights lawyer, was speaking to mark the 50th anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

AAP daw/mfh/kr

KEYWORD: RIGHTS ROBERTSON

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