The Maldives has asked the UN Human Rights Council to consider an International Court of Human rights, offering redress for the victims of human rights violations and strengthening the international human rights system.
State Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmed Naseem spoke at the opening of the UN Human Rights Council and again at an event hosted by the Maldives yesterday, attended by over 150 diplomats, UN officials, and NGOs workers.
The event was organised by the Permanent Missions of Maldives, Switzerland and Uruguay, in cooperation with the International Commission of Jurists, the Panel on Human Dignity and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, focusing on accountability for human rights abuses. Speakers noted that there was no way in which an individual whose rights have been violated can hold a State to account at international level, and discussed how such a court might function practice, as well as the challenges to its establishment.
Speaking at the event were Professor Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, Commissioner and Rapporteur on Children, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; former Independent Expert of the UN Secretary-General for the study on violence against children; Professor Manfred Nowak, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, former member of the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances; Judge Theodor Meron, former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Judge on the Appeals Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the ICTY; and Judge Philippe Texier, Judge, Cour de Cassation, France, member (and former Chair) of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and Commissioner at the International Commission of Jurists.
The speakers noted that, under the existing human rights system, Asia was problematic because unlike Europe and South America, there was no regional human rights court. They therefore proposed that the UN return to the idea, first debated by the UN in 1947 but put on hold because of the Cold War, of establishing an International Court of Human Rights as “the final guarantor of human rights”.
In her address to the meeting, the Maldives Ambassador Iruthisham Adam said that it is vital, in countries suffering systematic human rights abuses, that individuals have recourse to effective remedy at international level.
(0)Dislikes
(0)