Updates on Ireland from Derry's Pat Finucane Centre 

from Irish News, 26/2/01

Human rights are not goods to be bartered

By Mark Thompson

As the peace process nears something resembling an end game, Mark Thompson, coordinator with the Relatives for Justice group in Belfast, looks at the human rights situation in Northern Ireland and warns against the temptation to trade inalienable human rights for political advantage at the negotiations table

THERE is considerable and growing concern that matters relating to outstanding human rights abuses may increasingly become issues to be bartered with within the peace process and continuing negotiations.

Human rights are inalienable rights, separate and not conditional to any negotiated political process.

They are stand-alone issues.

The very fact that families, relatives and human rights activists have had to assume responsibility for obtaining truth and justice for abuses committed against them - including working toward independent mechanisms to this aim - is in itself of extreme concern.

Views shared and echoed by almost the entire international community.

The view that movement towards inquiries, whether independent or otherwise, will create the conditions for a deal on policing is erroneous.

Such a move may be misinterpreted, giving the British government the impression that the promise of an investigation into one or a few individual cases exonerates its responsibility for all other abuses.

It most certainly does not.

The logic of this is that, if these three incidents had not occurred, then the RUC would be an acceptable force.

This is clearly not the case.

Caution needs to be exercised.

The just and reasonable demands for inquiries are rights not to be somehow presented as concessions.

It is to be welcomed that political parties are supporting the call by families and relatives for independent inquiries and for truth and justice.

However, in the cut and thrust of negotiation, human rights must not become trade-offs.

The fact that political parties are being encouraged to sign up to proposals/deals on policing in this context is ironic in itself when one considers the backgrounds to some of the cases involved.

In many instances it is the same organisation (the RUC) which has committed and been implicated in these same human rights abuses, and in all probability the same individuals responsible will remain within that or any new structure with few checks or balances.

This is both breathtaking and astonishing.

If these inquiries become trade-offs it will be an affront to the memory of those killed and injured and a disservice to the ethos and principles of human rights.

Human rights must not be allowed to be reduced to a level of becoming the carrot for compromise.

When emerging out of a conflict that has witnessed horrific abuse we should be promoting, protecting and implementing safeguards to prevent abuses.

This can only be achieved by careful and comprehensive examination of past abuses.

Above all this approach should be the centrepiece and legacy for all of us.

The British government are not independent arbitrators.

They have a vested interest in preventing the full truth about their role in the conflict from emerging; and they have gone to great lengths to pursue this.

There are hundreds of cases involving shoot-to-kill and collusion that need to be satisfactorily resolved.

The truth about these incidents would in themselves inform, direct and identify what needs to be changed.

The untold truth behind many of these atrocities is adding a direct and strategic impediment to real and positive change.

Political leaderships and civic society - along with human rights groups and those affected - need to establish a strategic vehicle to allow the full truth and facts to be told about all human rights abuses during the conflict.

This is the only valid and legitimate mechanism that will provide closure for those directly affected, and which will enable us to face the future as a nation at peace with itself.

There are those who will be strenuously opposed to the truth and who would selectively choose to forget about the past, and who would also attempt to use other human rights abuses committed by non-state agencies in an attempt to deflect attention or cancel out legitimate claims for truth and justice.

Our challenge is to face into our past and deal with all of its legacies.

It is now time to unravel the threads of the conflict, to acquire the truth and learn the lessons no matter how unpalatable, and then to move forward collectively, building a new, just and equal society whose cornerstone and foundation is one of human rights.