The forthcoming UN summit on racism and xenophobia needs high-level political input from world leaders if it is to produce a breakthrough, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, said yesterday.
Mrs Robinson, who was in Washington to lobby the State Department, Congress, and multinational lending institutions on the summit, urged top politicians to do "a bit of risk-taking" to break potential deadlocks at the conference.
Preparations for the meeting in Durban at the end of July have become entangled in demands by some African countries that the summit declaration should link a condemnation of the role of slavery with specific reparations in the form of development aid. The US and the EU are strongly opposed to such wording. A more marginalised dispute about the desire of some to characterise Zionism as "a form of racism" is also causing problems.
Mrs Robinson said that the summit had the potential to do for the struggle against racism what Beijing had done for women's rights in setting out a global consensus for the first time and establishing standards and commitments that could be monitored. It would be wrong for that breakthrough to be jeopardised by a use of language that could not command a consensus, she said.
While some had insisted that the summit should simply be forward-looking, there was a growing understanding that "we can't do that unless we address the past" and that it was crucial to address the issue of slavery, particularly for the South Africans and other Africans. But a global forum was not the place to expect individual apologies, she said. Language in the final declaration about slavery, she believed, would express international abhorrence at the practice.
Mrs Robinson will be attending an EU foreign ministers meeting next week and the Organisation of African Unity summit to press the issue and said she welcomed the degree of engagement expressed by the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, to the summit.
Mrs Robinson also said that she was continuing to express concern to the US administration about the persistence of the death penalty, particularly for those with mental disabilities. She welcomed her "sense that issues relating to the death penalty in the US are being seriously reopened".
Currently 149 countries have renounced the death penalty while some 72 still apply it, she said. The US found itself 5th in this league, "in strange company", with 85 executions last year, behind China (1,000 plus), Iraq (400), Iran (153), and Saudi Arabia (121).
