Reality check: Human rights nongovernmental organisations confront governments at the United Nations

Abstract

Official acknowledgement of the importance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) in the work of the United Nations (UN) human rights programmes remains a subject of intense controversy. Warm admiration for the full range of actions by human rights NGOs expressed in the draft text prepared for the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna stands in stark contrast to the more cautious final text that was adopted.' Governments limited their appreciation to some but not all nongovernmental activities by notably excluding human rights monitoring from the list. Further, they declared, international human rights principles and national law protect only those NGOS 'genuinely involved in human rights'. The draft was prepared by members of the secretariat, and the final text was negotiated by government representatives from 171 countries. The differences between the two reveal the gap between, on the one hand, the dependency of UN expert human rights mechanisms on information supplied by human rights NGOs and, on the other hand, government resentment of NGO reports and activism. Many governments, especially those criticised by nongovernmental organizations, persistently labour to limit the formal access and participation of nongovernmental human rights organisations and to challenge the legitimacy of their findings.2 This seeming contradiction of maintaining both dependency and distance reflects certain fundamental characteristics associated with human rights NGOS themselves and the goals that they seek to advance through the United Nations and other international bodies. Yet human rights NGOs are the engine for virtually every advance made by the United Nations in the field of human rights since its founding. NGOS put human rights into the UN Charter That the United Nations addresses human rights issues at all is revolutionary. The initiative to turn the UN Charter into an instrument concerned with promoting respect for the human rights of individuals came from the 42 US organisations invited to be present as 'consultants' to the United States delegation at the founding conference in San Francisco in 1945. Their conviction that respect for human rights and the dignity of the individual was essential to peace and conflict prevention stemmed not merely from deep-seated American 0143-6597/95/030389-16 ?1995 Third world Quarerly