Human Rights Watch today called on the United States to throw its support behind
an upcoming United Nations-sponsored World Conference Against Racism.
The group is concerned that with only one month remaining before the summit opens in Durban, South Africa, the United States had not yet even decided whether to participate, and is providing only paltry financial support.
"The Bush administration needs to show that it really cares about the problem of racism, in the United States and around the world," said Reed Brody, Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch. "The way to do that is to use this conference to press for concrete solutions and programs to address the problem, not to sit on the sidelines."
The Bush administration is postponing a decision on summit participation until it has assurances that the conference will not take up several hot-button issues. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on June 20 in a Senate hearing that matters like compensation for slavery and attacks on Israel could derail the meeting and State Department spokesman Richard Boucher has said the United States' participation depends on how these topics are dealt with.
Human Rights Watch also is troubled that many countries were seeking to single out Israel for condemnation of racist practices. While it has documented and denounced Israeli abuses against Palestinians and called on Israel to respect the right of Palestinian refugees to return, it stressed that if the conference were going to name countries which practice severe forms of racism, its list should be much longer.
At the same time, Human Rights Watch emphasized that if the United States wants to influence the outcome of this debate, it must stay engaged. "The Administration thinks it can delegitimize the conference by staying away," Brody said. "It's only going to succeed in ceding important decisions to others."
A Bush administration paper has also warned the meeting not to apportion blame for past injustices or to seek to exact compensation for these acts. Human Rights Watch has said that governments should compensate groups that suffer today because of slavery or other severe racist practices and it has proposed the establishment of truth commissions to examine how a government's past racist practices contribute to contemporary deprivation and to propose methods of redress.
Human Rights Watch was also critical of the U.S. lack of financial support for the meeting. The Clinton administration committed an initial $250,000 toward the conference before it left office, and the Bush administration has not increased that. By contrast, the United States provided several million dollars to the 1995 United Nations conference on women in Beijing.
Human Rights Watch said that it hopes that the conference, in addition to addressing past injustices, will establish concrete programs to stamp out racism today and that it will recognize caste-based discrimination as a form of racism, address the racist treatment of refugees and migrants and press governments to review how their laws and practices favor one race over another.
The U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance will meet from August 31 to September 7.
