Th.C. van Boven

The Anti-Racism Durban Review Conference

united Nations (uN) involvement with issues of racism and racial discrimination goes back to the early years of the organisation. The political and moral repugnance against the racist laws and the horrific practices of the Nazi-regime and its allies led to the adoption of the Genocide convention and the affirmation of the principles enunciated by the Nuremberg International military Tribunal. Another impulse marking the anti-racism agenda was the post-world war II decolonisation drive of peoples and nations seeking to exercise their right to self-determination. They associated colonial rule with white domination. Thus, anti-colonialism and anti-racism were perceived to be closely linked. The opposition against the Apartheid policy of the white minority regime in South Africa, considered the most consistent and institutionalised form of racial discrimination, was for long a major item on the political agenda of the united Nations. It was against that background that the united Nations developed a series of political and legal means to combat racial discrimination including Apartheid as a consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights, which prevailed over objections based on the principle of non-intervention in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of States. These political and legal means served in later years as precedents to introduce inquiries and enforcement measures in the broad area of the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. For long the view was prevalent among the majority of the membership of the united Nations that racism and racial discrimination was a structural wrong particularly inherent in societies of a colonialist and capitalist imprint and that other nations were not infected by this evil. consequently, combating racism and racial discrimination was perceived by many as a struggle against an alien phenomenon and treated as a matter of foreign policy. Special target areas were South Africa before the official dismantling of Apartheid and the Israeli occupied territories in the middle East. only gradually the awareness developed, and the committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (cERD) as a uN Treaty Body played a significant role in this respect, that no society is free

Acceptance statement of the 2004 Carnegie

It is with pride and great pleasure that I have accepted the 2004 Carnegie-Wateler Peace Prize. I consider it a special honour that the Board of Directors of the Carnegie Foundation has chosen me as their laureate in the year that the Carnegie Foundation celebrates its hundred years’ anniversary. This year’s award of the Carnegie-Wateler Peace Prize also symbolises and affirms that an inherent link exists between peace and human rights. This event in the venerable Peace Palace in The Hague offers me the opportunity to reflect on some four decades of involvement in human rights issues, and in particular on the growing role of human rights in international law and international relations. Quite some time ago a Norwegian member of an international human rights expert body observed with a slight sense of scepticism that their meetings at the basement level of United Nations Headquarters in New York were an indication of the modest place attributed to human rights. Today, if he would still have been alive, he could witness that human rights, at least at the bureaucratic level, are accommodated in palaces. I am not referring to the Peace Palace here in The Hague which is hosting highly respected international legal institutions, but to the Palais des Droits de l’Homme in Strasbourg and the Palais Wilson in Geneva. Leaving aside the question whether a palace is a fitting place for human rights, the move from the basement to the palace clearly symbolises a trend. A trend which generates high dignitaries, officials and institutions all over the world in numerous countries, such as Ministers and State Secretaries for Human Rights, Human Rights Ambassadors and Special Envoys, Human Rights High Commissioners, National Human Rights Commissioners, Human Rights Professors, Human Rights Study Centers and a variety of other human rights professionals, practitioners and academics. There remains though the intriguing question whether the move from the basement to the palace and the professionalisation of human rights is having a commensurate impact on the actual enjoyment of human rights in the world at large. It may be tempting to speak about this proliferation of human rights officials and institutions with a critical intonation and to consider this trend as window-dressing, but such an approach would not do justice to the efforts of many, practitioners and academics, to enhance respect for human rights and to strengthen their basis in law and education. Moreover and most importantly, this trend also inter-acts with and responds to the almost explosive growth in the past forty or fifty years of civil society PART C: APPENDICES