I United Nations
| Date | 01 June 1992 |
| Published date | 01 June 1992 |
| DOI | 10.1177/016934419201000206 |
| Subject Matter | Part B: Human Rights News |
NQHR2/1992
PART B: HUMAN RIGHTS NEWS
I UNITED NATIONS·
Commission on Human RIghts
48th
Session,
Geneva,
27 January to 6
March
1992
For the first time the Commission consisted of 53 members including 10 new
members of the African, Asian and Latin American regions. This enlargement
did, however, not lead to increasing North-South tensions and domination by
the South, as had been feared by many Western diplomats. Rather, there
emerged a more diverse voting pattern than ever before in the Commission.
Many Latin American and African States voted together with Western and
Eastern-European ones in
orderto
denounce serious human rights violations in
their own regions and to improve human rights standards. Only the Asian
region remains comparably united in fighting against most efforts to strengthen
human rights. And the one-sided, purely political approach
of
the United States
again proved to be counter-productive.
In the field
of
standard setting the Commission was very successful. After
many years
of
drafting it adopted draft declarations on minorities and on
disappearances which could soon be finally adopted by the General Assembly.
In addition, an Austrian proposal to create a new emergency mechanism, which
would empower the chairperson or bureau of the Commission in between
regular sessions to initiate fact-finding action in new and urgent cases
of
serious human rights violations, received so much initial support from all
regions that
it
has good chances to be adopted in the near future. Finally, the
Commission established apre-sessional working group to draft an Optional
Protocol to the Convention against Torture with a view to create a universal
system
of
preventive visits to places of detention on the lines
of
the European
Convention for the Prevention
of
Torture. The proposal of the Special
Rapporteuron Iraq, Mr. Van der Stoel (Nederlands), to reactwith extraordinary
measures (the sending of human rights monitors to the country) to a situation
of extraordinary grave human rights violations (in his opinion the worst case
since Nazi Germany) failed, however, due to lack of support already within the
EC-countries.
*
Manfred
Nowak
184
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