Tactics and tools for the protection
of Human Rights Defenders

November 2011

Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) works for the practical realisation of human rights in the lives of ordinary people in the Commonwealth. This report, CHRI’s eleventh to the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), is a natural progression from previous reports which suggested practical means by which many governance and justice challenges in the Commonwealth can be overcome. A Partnership for Human Rights: Civil Society and National Human Rights Institutions encourages close cooperation between national human rights institutions and civil society. It has been deliberately designed to be a constructive point of engagement to improve the relationship between NHRIs and civil society. The report makes practical suggestions on how engagement can be used, and has been optimised in the past, to enhance the promotion and protection of human rights in the Commonwealth.
CHRI has always advocated that the Commonwealth is about human rights or it is about nothing at all. Unlike other intergovernmental organisations, the Commonwealth has neither a universal membership, nor a geographic, thematic, military or economic focus to define its central purpose. Instead, the Commonwealth, which emerged in the spirit of postcolonial ideals such as freedom and democracy, only has a set of values around which to organise itself and build its identity.
Despite the many protestations of the Commonwealth and its member states that human rights are central to the organisation’s core beliefs – and the oft-repeated assertion that the Commonwealth is as much an association of peoples as it is an intergovernmental organisation – the reality of the majority of people living in the Commonwealth demonstrates a paucity of rights and justice. This, CHRI believes, is due in large part to the failure of Commonwealth governments to create environments where everyone can realise and exercise guaranteed human rights. It is also a result of the Commonwealth’s “consensus” approach which has kept the organisation silent on major human rights violations in member states, resulting in several missed opportunities to transform the soaring rhetoric of CHOGM communiqués into action.
To its credit, the Commonwealth has nurtured some non-confrontational approaches to address the human rights of its roughly two billion people. It has done so, for example, through its leadership in debt reduction, by impelling member states to sign the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and through its encouragement and practical assistance in setting up national human rights institutions (NHRIs) in member states.
There are now well over thirty NHRIs in the Commonwealth. It is this report’s assertion that, while the establishment of an NHRI should be applauded, the body cannot effectively fulfil its mandate in isolation. NHRIs and civil society must work together, where mutually beneficial, to advance each other’s efforts and the ultimate goal of improving human rights.
The Commonwealth needs to do all it can to catalyse support and assist in making this happen. The Commonwealth Heads of Government should encourage and promote engagement by giving the Commonwealth Secretariat a mandate to build cooperation between NHRIs and civil society. This would present an opportunity for Commonwealth realities to lean closer to the Commonwealth’s fundamental values of human rights, but also make good on the multiple CHOGM statements urging that civil society engagement be mainstreamed into all of the Commonwealth functions and activities.