We are only three days away from the day, when UN member states will determine the fate one of the most vulnerable groups of our society - ethnic minorities. Yesterday the three co-sponsors including, UK, South Africa and India, submitted the Working Paper on 'inter-ethnic issues involving minorities'.
We are sure that you remember previous interviews regarding this WP, where it was agreed what will be the basic orientation and essential parts of the working paper regarding the rights of minorities. In previous week co-sponsoring states finalized the text of the WP and at this occasion shared the information with UN Herald on the latest changes of the WP.
More precisely co-sponsors added the clause where they "condemn terrorist and extremist actions that are motivated by religious, ethnic, racial or any other hatred", besides they also asked the Human Rights Council to "extend the mandate of independent expert on minorities to also be in charge of this resolution". Moreover the will to strengthen regional cooperation stays as well and according to our co-speakers special attention in the WP is given to religious minorities. They also kept some of the most 'disputable' clauses, because as Ms. Petković said "we believe that it is a good thing to be ambitious and see how the states will respond during the debate." We were also interested whether they have introduced any clauses of 'affirmative actions', but they replied that these were not explicitly included, however the three states are encouraging the member states to propose the amendments, subject of which would be a positive discrimination. Speaking of amendments, UK mentioned the amendment regarding the pluralism of media, which in our opinion could be contentious for some states.
In order to reach more effective implementation of the minorities rights UK, South Africa and India would like to encourage the states to make more efforts in order to establish some kind of intra-state controlling mechanisms which would pay attention on the violation of minorities rights and on relations majority-minority.
Last but not least they have said that they are very pleasantly surprised that eleven states showed the support for the WP.
Since the delegate of India Ms. Maša Tiselj was not available for the interview today, she send us written comment on the WP:
"India is very satisfied with the working paper, we are very glad that a clause that deplores ethnically, religiously and racially motivated acts of terrorism and extremism was added, since such acts not only produce individual casualties (which is horrifying by itself) but they also undermine good relations among diverse communities and they pose a threat to the spirit of unity and brotherhood among them. The final version of this working paper also touches another issue which we believe is important and too often neglected - the issue of (under)development and its role in escalation of inter-ethnic conflicts (we would like to thank the representative of Ethiopia who wrote a clause on it). There were also talks about inclusion of affirmative action in the working paper (India even wrote a clause on it) but at the end we (the co-sponsors) agreed that so far we will not include it since it may be too controversial for some countries. However as representatives of South Africa and United Kingdom already said, we encourage other states to propose amendments on this topic as well as on any other topics that they believe are important but missing in our working paper."
For more details watch the video below:
0 comments:
Post a Comment