Asian Human Rights Commission

[Ed. Note: The following interview was conducted on May 30, 2001, at the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) office in Hong Kong by Bruce Van Voorhis. Tapan Bose is the secretary-general of the South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) in Kathmandu, Nepal.]

AHRC: One of the topics that interests us in Asia is, of course, the U.N. human rights conventions-the ratification of these conventions by various States in Asia or their non-ratification. Can you discuss these various U.N. human rights conventions and how the thrust of these conventions can be implemented in States in Asia even when the States haven't signed these specific conventions?

BOSE: There are two or three problems. One is that, though the States have signed, say the UDHR [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] or the ICCPR [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ] or the ICESCR [International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights]-almost all countries now have signed the UDHR-the UDHR is a declaration. The UDHR is not a convention or a legal treaty. The UDHR is more like a moral statement, a statement by the international community, by humanity as such, to create a certain standard and norm for ourselves.

Then from the UDHR follows other instruments-the ICESCR, the ICCPR. Then there are various protocols that have come up; there is the Convention against Torture, the Convention against Discrimination against Women, the Child's Rights Convention and special instruments, like the U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees and a protocol to that convention. These are some of the major human rights conventions which are in the nature of what is called a treaty law.

The U.N. is set up like a club of nations. It's a situation in which the boys get together and sign a document and say we shall abide by it. But then there is a weakness of the U.N. mechanism, for each of the club members is sovereign. Consequently, each of these members, even when they sign a joint document of the club, say, "What I do inside my country or inside my 'home' is my business; you can't poke your nose into it." This has basically been the tension, that the States are jealously guarding their right to their sovereignty, which means that I may have signed it, but what I do with it in my own territory is my business. And also most of the States have put reservations on some of these conventions-these brackets as we call them.

Now the club, or the U.N., allows this whole thing of fair play. How fair this is I don't understand, for it allows India, for example, to say that I signed the ICCPR but these three or four articles I will not allow; I will not abide by them-similarly Sri Lanka and others. Many countries of our region in Asia have actually not even signed the ICCPR.

Now the question arises, How do we get the governments to actually implement or abide by these conventions? For one of the problems that most of the human rights defenders face, particularly in South Asia, is that the governments, while having signed and ratified some of these instruments, have actually not created laws at the domestic level which will enable the legal implementation of these covenants.

There is a distinction made in law, that is, it's called international law and domestic or municipal law. The courts have jurisdiction-national courts-either district courts, state courts, county courts, the Supreme Court-primarily on national law, and national law will get precedence over international law in domestic matters. This is the doctrine on the basis on which the courts function.

India, for example, is a signatory to all of these three conventions and the declaration. As a result, India is committed not to torture, not to arrest people in an illegal manner, not to forcibly take people away without making any formal arrest, to treat all detainees humanely, and yet, India has enacted laws from time to time that iolate its commitments, like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which was created in the mid-'50s, and something called the Disturbed Areas Notification. Under these acts, the government virtually suspends all fundamental rights, even those guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. The government hands over absolute power to the army over the area where it is applied. The government says this is a disturbed area, like in the Northeast of India or in Kashmir or partly in Punjab earlier. It means that your human rights are suspended, your fundamental rights are suspended. In addition, the army is empowered to shoot to kill. The army can enter any home and search it. The army can cordon an entire area affecting all of the people and ransack people's belongings while they conduct their interrogation and search. The army can even destroy property in the interests of security. The army can blow up buildings, burn them down, whatever it likes. It can force a whole village to move from one place to another; and under the law, the soldiers and the officers who do all of this cannot be prosecuted without express clearance from the central government. This law is a complete violation of the commitments India has made.

AHRC: It sounds like declaring martial law without declaring martial law.

BOSE: Precisely. It's even worse because under martial law there is a martial law administration mechanism that has to be implemented; the government has to be accountable. But under these others acts, there is a de facto suspension of civilian rule and an actual handing over to the army of a lack of accountability.

This has been raised in the U.N. Human Rights Commission again and again. India has been told to amend the law. There are certain provisions in the law which are extremely dangerous and harmful from the victims' perspective. India has been asked to repeal these provisions, but India goes to Geneva and says that, in the interests of national security, the government is the ultimate judge to decide whether to have these laws or not to have them.

The constitutionality though of this law has been challenged in several High Courts as well as in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court unfortunately has, in fact, not only upheld the law, but it has even gone to the extent of striking down certain restrictions imposed on this law by some state High Courts. In this case, the Supreme Court of India followed the doctrine of the executive's right to decide on matters of security. The Supreme Court took the position that it is not the domain of the Supreme Court to examine the considerations which are related to national security. It is the job of the executive, and the executive says that, No, this will jeopardise national security. As an organ of the State, we are bound to uphold this, and therefore, we will not strike it down; we will not even allow certain restrictions to be imposed.

These then are some of the problems, and the problems emanate essentially from this doctrine of national sovereignty and the supremacy of national security considerations. India is the example I've used, but it is the same everywhere, even in the United States, which, for example, has walked out of the Kyoto agreement exactly on the grounds that it jeopardises national security so I will not honour my commitment. Similarly, it wants to walk out of its ABM commitment on missiles. It wants to categorically say that altered situations require new instruments on national security so the NMD [national missile defence], the government of the United States claims, is a requirement of the national security of the United States. As a result, it will unleash a new missile race and arms race of the worst kind.

AHRC: It's very ironic because supposedly the Cold War is over.

BOSE: Precisely.

AHRC: The U.S. also holds its position on the Kyoto environmental treaty, not only for national security reasons, but also for economic reasons.

BOSE: Ultimately, everything comes down to this. It is national interests, and national interests are the national economy. The national economy is also national security; industry is also national security. Everything ultimately is in the national interests of the country.

Consequently, there is this problem. It's not only in South Asia; but in our countries, the problem is much more acute because in the West the guarantee is not the U.N.; the guarantee is the robustness of the democracy; the guarantee is citizens' awareness. Western capitalism and Western nation-states are also far more advanced. State-making has gone through the whole process and has already gone through various stages of violence. These are not States which are internally unstable. These are polities where institutions are fairly well-developed, and these are also States which came out of World War II and in the '50s and '60s got involved in the rebuilding of society. In the process, they built fairly stable and in many ways quite humane institutions of social security, of support. Even though these are capitalistic economies, they have a certain inherent system, institutions, which have given this awareness. For example, it's not possible for the authorities to behave in a certain manner as they do in other countries because they'll be heavily criticised and perhaps thrown out of office.

AHRC: Thus, part of the issue has to do with what's termed "civil society" and the role that it can play in countering the power of the State, meaning that in the so-called more developed democracies or societies the government cannot step across a certain line because the people won't stand for it.

BOSE: Sure, there's no doubt about that. The institutions, both the process as well as the content and the richness of the content, is very much visible in the West, which you don't find in countries in Asia with institutions that aren't as mature. Civil society in the West is a lot more active, stronger, and it has enormous reach, and it's not dependent on the State. The dependency of civil society on the State, which was evident in Europe in the '50s or '60s when it was still in the growth stage, where for education, for culture, for recreation, for everything-particularly in Europe-people looked to the State. The States were welfare states. The States were welfare economies; they were mixed economy States which invested heavily in the social infrastructure of society.

The welfare system has even survived in the United States. For example, education is still a public exchequer item. It is paid for by the community. It's moved from the State to the community-local self-governments-like the municipalities. They have very clearly defined and demarcated areas of function-the civic bodies as they're called-and there's a link between the civic bodies and their functions and civil society, which supported public health engineering, education, sanitation, the water supply, local transport, the maintenance of parks and gardens, the recreation centres. This was all seen as something that the people of the locality should do, and they paid for it. All of these institutions have now developed, and there is a democratic functioning.

These though are non-existent in the Third World countries which adopted the model of liberal democracy. We are still entirely dependent on the State because resources are very limited, because what the municipality of New York can do is unthinkable for even some of the states in India because of the tax base. The taxpayers of New York are rich, and they have the capacity to pay for many things.

AHRC: American society is more of a middle-class society so there the tax base is obviously higher.

BOSE: Absolutely, and that's what brings us to the inherent drawbacks of this system in the Third World. These are very poor countries. Their peasantry constitutes 70 to 80 percent of the population. Out of this figure, 50 percent are basically unemployed. The real incomes of our people are very low, and democracy has basically been highly elite-driven, and the elite is very small. Folks actually depend on the State, but the reality of these democracies is that they are controlled by the elite for the benefit of the elite.

Now when this elite was benign, say in the '40s immediately after India's independence, the elite was driven by idealism; the elite, because we just acquired independence, wanted to build a very strong and powerful nation. A large section of this elite was imbued with the idealism of Gandhi and Nehru and socialism and Marxism and communism, and we wanted to do many things so we adopted a programme of a mixed economy, a socialistic pattern of economy and State. We said that the State will pay for education; the State will pay for health; the State will pay for the basic infrastructure development; the State will also develop the core industries, etc., and it will set up model employers who will provide housing, health care, education for the children and so forth. Industrial townships were all part of this plan.

AHRC: There was a vision involved.

BOSE: There was; but by the '60s and '70s, the vision was disappearing; and in the '80s, India was playing the lead role in opening up the economy, linking it to the global market. Earlier we in India said that those who work hard will get their blessing in heaven. Now we say that those who help themselves will go there; those who don't help themselves will remain here. This then is the way it has turned out. To expect this elite to now actually contribute or to play the role of what Gandhi called "the trustees of people's wealth" is not evident anymore.

AHRC: It seems that leaders earlier had much more of a sense of the common good; they wanted to build something, but it seems like this sense of the common good has been lost.

BOSE: The common good has now been reduced to the individual's good so it is now said that, if six people are good, then the community is good. [laughter] It's like this.

There is this whole link if you look at the whole international system, not only the U.N. Let's look at the World Bank, which is also a multilateral system; let's look at the IMF [International Monetary Fund]; let's look at the other multilateral institutions, like the WTO [World Trade Organisation]. All of these are in a way linked by the same classes. They're all promoting what is now the dominant ideology of neo-liberalism. It's free market democracy. In free market democracy, which is obviously redefined-completely redefined-there is no longer the liberal democracy, political democracy or social democracy of the old liberal school. Neo-liberalism has changed. It is in this context when we look at human rights or the human rights commitments of States that one has to be very careful to examine the international environment.

Coming back to the UDHR, it remains the ideal, but the fact is that, if you do not accept the UDHR as the threshold, then if you start descending you will sink into barbarism, and the societies which sink into barbarism find it very difficult in today's setting to actually climb out of their predicament. Examples are countries like Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone, also to a large extent the [Democratic Republic of] Congo, but let's look closer at South Africa.

South Africa has come out of the apartheid regime, and yet, it is a country which is coping, is unable to cope with the enormous violence that is internally being generated. It is not something from outside. It's really the violence that has become inherent in a society which has been pushed by this instrument of apartheid to a level, to sink to a level of violence, that one doesn't know how long it will take.

A similar thing happened in Sri Lanka. From 1971 to 1973 and from 1988 to 1990 or '91, hundreds of thousand of people were killed, and this happened in the South, not in the North. The killing in the North is separate. After having lived with this inhumanity in which anyone who comes to your door, knocks and takes you away-there are about 100,000 people missing-how do you expect the people to respond?

It would be absolutely wrong to think that violence has not become an integral part of the psyche because we have systematically shown them that institutions have no meaning, commitments are meaningless, the State has no responsibility, you have no rights, we can do what we like and every single norm can be broken. Once you force people into this situation-when you go to court, you get nothing; when you go to political leaders, you get nothing; when you see anyone who speaks out, they are killed, tortured or maimed-you come to accept this situation, and this becomes the norm. When this becomes the norm, there is also often a transformation of roles between the exploiter and the exploited, an internalisation of the exploiter by the exploited so that one's values and behaviour are affected.

Consequently, in Sri Lanka today, the Sinhalese in the South react so violently to the Tamils. This chauvinistic Sinhala nationalism was created in them by the repressive machinery of the State. They have been led to pay an enormous price to maintain that Sinhala State, that Sri Lankan State. They're not going to stand by and see it be destroyed by some Tamils just because they want justice.

AHRC: This dehumanising process seems largely at the root of the human rights problems throughout Asia and the violence that's become an accepted value of, not just the State, but of the whole society, and therefore, human rights activists have a huge amount of work ahead of them to try and counteract, not just the State, but also the society.

BOSE: Violence is a part of life. Everything is violent. We experience violence right from the time of our birth, but I would say that to reject violence or to shun violence has to be a conscious effort, and that has been the entire effort of humanity. That's what we call the process of civilising ourselves, of making the world more beautiful, etc., and democracy's strength is that it is the system which will give us the space to resolve our differences without resorting to violence.

What has happened though is that we have not gone anywhere near this objective. The reason is that the State has remained the fountainhead of all life. It's not only in Third World countries-it's everywhere. Today the accepted norm is that the State is the only legitimate user of violence; the State is the repository of all violence. Anyone else who uses violence does it illegitimately. The whole doctrine has been stood on its head. The State is the repository of violence; the State will use violence; the State has the right to kill; the State has the right to hang; the State has the right to control. The State is then using this whole doctrine of saying that, in the interests of development, I will ask 5,000 people to move away from their homes because I'm going to flood their area. For example, there are the cases of the Narmada dams in India or the population transfer that occurred n the Tennessee Valley development programme in the United States and what Russia did-it's still going on. Now Mr. Mahathir in Malaysia has also once again started building the Bakun Dam.

AHRC: Some States haven't signed the U.N. conventions on human rights. In spite of this, is there any way that human rights can be promoted and protected in these countries?

BOSE: This links up with this question of how do we protect and how do we promote human rights. One of the things that as a human rights defender I think is very important for us to always focus on is the Universal Declaration. Secondly, the community of human rights defenders as well as the judiciary has an important role to play wherever the judiciary is able to function independently. Not all countries, as we know, have an independent judiciary. The judiciary's independence is very important. The importance of these covenants for the whole of humanity as such is to try and make the judiciary stronger.

The third area that I think we need to focus on is this whole false argument of the States in Asia that the international covenants are something imposed from outside the region. The Universal Declaration is not from Mars. The Universal Declaration is not a U.S. agenda or a Western State agenda. The Universal Declaration belongs to humanity. It's as much our heritage as that of the white man, black man, yellow man. It's thus wrong to say that the UDHR and the other covenants are a foreign imposition. They're as much applicable here as anywhere else. Consequently, when the rights of the ethnic minorities or Afro-American people in the United States are violated, the same principle applies. Consequently, it's not something from outside imposed on Asia.

A second point is the issue of double standards. When the WTO says that you dismantle your labour protection mechanism or when WTO says that you change your patent laws, do you do it without a murmur?

AHRC: In the name of free trade.

BOSE: Yes. Do you do it without a murmur? When the WTO says change the thrust of your budget and increase the price of basic commodities, increase the price of electricity, water and so on, do you do it? Is that not interference with your sovereignty? We don't hear you complaining against that. We don't hear you complaining against the conditionalities imposed by the IMF, the structural changes asked by the IMF and the World Bank. You give them very happily.

AHRC: Or even if you complain, you end up doing it.

BOSE: No, no, most of the time you're going on all fours. [laughter]

When one set of interference with your internal policies is acceptable, how come the other set is not? Actually, the set related to human rights is not interference; it is something that belongs to the whole of humanity.

This is something we as human rights activists have actually not been able to do. At least I know in South Asia, this is where we have failed as a human rights community, that is, to constantly hammer on this that human rights is the heritage of every human being. It is nothing like Western or Asian or any cultural specificity. These are all false arguments.

AHRC: If you take the so-called Asian values argument, it's saying that we in Asia want to oppress our people and that the people want to be repressed, which, of course, is absurd.

BOSE: Exactly. It's saying that the people are happy to eat and die and they do it so that Mr. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore can propound his theory of Confucian Buddhism or whatever. This is where we have failed to challenge the States. This is important I think. It should be linked.

A third issue is to explain to the judiciary that, where the State has signed a treaty, the State has already made an obligation. If the Indian State has signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, CEDAW [Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women], ICCPR and the other conventions, then the Indian State, on behalf of the people of India, has made a commitment to the international community that it will abide by these norms.

AHRC: It's not an option?

BOSE: It's not an option. If you don't abide by them, you're making the people of India out to be a liar in front of the world community. If the government of India files false reports to an international treaty monitoring body, it is making the people of India look bad. It is, in fact, an insult to the nation.

AHRC: It's as if the Indian State is saying that the Indian people don't deserve these rights or to be treated as human as people elsewhere.

BOSE: Yes. What is the State? The State's sovereignty is derived from the people. That's the doctrine of sovereignty. If, as a representative of the State's sovereignty, the government lies, it means that the government is making the whole people of the nation out to be a bunch of liars. It's dishonouring its own people-first, by not abiding by the commitments it makes and, secondly, by giving false information.

There is another area where I think we should campaign. Whenever the State signs a treaty or ratifies a convention, it never enacts a law to enable it. It does not even inform its citizens. It does not have any programme of educating its own people and the institutions of the police. Under the ICCPR, there are obligations to train your law enforcement agencies. You have to incorporate many changes. You don't do it. We as human rights campaigners should then insist that you signed these treaties, even with the reservations, that these are the conditions you've agreed to, these are the provisions you have acceded to, these necessitate that you should do these following things. I have often thought that we should ask the Supreme Court of India-and this is perhaps something I should do and we want to start in India where the judiciary is still a little free and relatively more independent-to direct the government to fulfil its treaty obligations; and if the government fails to do so, then it should bring the government to court for failing to fulfil the commitment it has made to the world community on behalf of the Indian people. These then are some of the areas on which to campaign.

Another area relates again to the whole issue of the independence of the judiciary. In India particularly, we have found that the High Courts at the state level-we have a two-tiered system-the states, the federating units, have High Courts and then there is the federal Supreme Court - have the power of judicial review in the Constitution, which is not found in many other constitutions. Therefore, the courts have the primary jurisdiction to go into this area of international human rights conventions, and some of our courts have upheld international covenants and have invoked them, like in the case of refugees, though India is not a signatory to the refugee convention. The Indian Supreme Court held that the Indian Constitution puts an obligation on the State of India to protect the life of every person.

AHRC: Regardless of whether they're a citizen or not?

BOSE: The word used in the Constitution is person. They said it does not say "citizens," and therefore, you are obliged to protect them. In fact, the courts have gone to the extent of interpreting the fundamental rights chapter of the Indian Constitution as applicable to all who are present in the territory of India because they said you can't discriminate, and you can't discriminate on the basis of a person being a citizen or non-citizen.

They also said in the case of the Sri Lankans and Burmese that have been thrown back to their countries, for example, that if you throw someone back to a place where there's enough reason to believe that their life will be in jeopardy that means that you're violating their right to life and you can't do that. The Constitution says that you have to protect a person's right to life, and the courts have even gone to the extent of interpreting this in relation to the closure of schools- schools which are being run by some agencies for Tamil refugee children in Karnataka, for example, or in Tamil Nadu. In both cases, the High Courts said that the Supreme Court has upheld a person's right to life, and it has explained and expanded on the theme of right to life, saying the complete enjoyment of life. Any limitation imposed arbitrarily or unfairly is a violation. Consequently, if you do not allow the children to get an education, it is an arbitrary and unfair limitation on the child's right to life.


These then are ways of being able to expand the frontiers. We've been able to get protection for refugees, even without India having signed the refugee convention, and the Supreme Court has also said - and this has now been accepted even in Sri Lanka and Pakistan-that when there is no specific national law then international law provisions will prevail.

AHRC: Is there a way for the courts or some other part of the government to force the executive branch or the legislature to enact laws to recognise the provisions of the conventions when they have signed them and, having enacted the laws, to enforce them because it seems that there's also a problem of enforcement once you have the laws?

BOSE: Enforceability depends on both the State as well as the judiciary and the vigilance of citizens. It is not a mandatory condition in the U.N. conventions that when you ratify a convention you have to pass a law. Most States have-it's an option. Since it's not mandatory though, I can't go to the Supreme Court of India or the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka and ask the government to enact a domestic law, but I think it should be achieved through campaigns; it should be achieved through making people more aware.

The thing that the State does not do is it does not actually inform the people. It does not allow its citizens to come to know the full import of these conventions and the treaty obligations it is entering into. It hides from them; and because it also lies on its implementation reports and its annual reports, it delays implementation enormously. Sometimes these countries don't file a report with the U.N. for three or four years. There is also no mechanism for punishing countries that do not fulfil their obligations and responsibilities under the conventions they sign, and the point is that the U.N. doesn't want to have this kind of mechanism because some of the powerful nation-states are also defaulters.

It is also a sad thing that the Western judiciary, like the German Appeal Court and the federal Supreme Court or even the U.S. appeal courts, have of late been issuing judgements which are quite regressive, particularly if you look at the Haitian refugee case and the Guant‡namo Cuban refugees where the U.S. appeal court said that people being held on the high seas or in an offshore U.S. base are not on U.S. territory and, therefore, they do not have the right to access to due process of law in the United States and they can be thrown back. This is a serious setback to the principle of non-refoulment.

Similarly, the German Supreme Court has held that people being held in detention areas, especially the designated areas in international airports, are not technically on the sovereign territory of Germany and, therefore, they can be denied the right to access to due process. Consequently, they cannot appeal to any German court; they cannot appeal for asylum to the designated authorities; they can be stopped. This is something which under the Schengen Convention is now being implemented and, as a rule, by all of the Western European countries, all of the Schengen countries, and this is a setback. This is a serious setback to human rights because the UDHR says every person has the right to seek asylum. It doesn't say every State has to give it, but people have a right to seek asylum. When my life is under threat, you should not deny me my right to seek asylum. You may deny to give it to me and say you don't deserve it or I don't believe you, but I have a right to due process.

In light of this, the Indian Supreme Court's decision, for example, is very progressive, but our fear is that if the Western powers in their own self-interest-Fortress Europe, etc.-keep on chipping away at these very hard-won principles and norms the effect will be a very serious domino effect on whatever little has been achieved in the Third World.

The last thing I would say is that there is also a need for building up alliances and solidarities between human rights activists in the Third World and in the First World. It's never been more needed in my opinion, particularly because these kinds of trends have started, and it will also ultimately effect the quality of democracy and the enjoyment of the rights of the people in their home countries because, once the State starts doing it, once you start saying this section can be denied the right to due process, it's only a matter of time before it affects its own people.

AHRC: They can find other excuses to deny people their rights. It sounds very dangerous. People generally think that the Western governments are the so-called defenders and promoters of human rights, but what you're saying is that they are the ones that are starting to erode the very things that they supposedly believe in the most.

BOSE: In the last 10 years, we have seen in the area of refugee rights that it is the Western governments which have dismantled them. It is the United States which has, in fact, now changed its own position on the procedure.

Due process is the foundation stone of the rule of law. Once you start dismantling it, it's a very serious threat. We see this happening in our countries all the time. They say the court system is too liberal and it's not doing this and that and it's a special situation so let's have a special law. When the special law is passed, it never goes away. In the next stage, you bring in another special law. Consequently, the special law becomes the norm, and the norm gets completely thrown out the window, and you slowly start losing ground. The special law becomes the law.

As we have seen, the reports are now out about how, in the name of fighting IRA [Irish Republican Army] terrorism, Scotland Yard, the best of the police forces in Europe we've been told, became absolutely ruthless, became so corrupt. It has done the kind of torture and other things that's unthinkable.

Today in Oldham in England there is a race war going on, and the Bangladeshi youth, which are second-generation British residents, working-class people, are claiming that the police are racists. There is also Rodney King's incident in the United States.

Similarly, if you pick up the Amnesty report on torture, you'll find Austria mentioned. The Austrian police treated a man almost the same way as what was done to the Jews in the concentration camps. In the Amnesty report, Austria wanted to deport this fellow. They killed a man in broad daylight in front of everybody. They put roles of adhesive tape on his whole body-on his upper torso, his nose, his mouth. On the flight from Vienna to Sophia, the man died from asphyxiation in the plane in front of a planeload of passengers. These are signs that we need to take note of.

Also the fact that, for example, Germany has been in the forefront of all the European countries which oppose any international treaty or instrument on minorities' rights. Why is it that until today we have really no effective mechanism for the protection of minority rights? We have the weakest instrument, and even the declaration that we got, which has been in the making for nearly 16 years because of the opposition of the European States, does not have a definition of a minority. The U.N. Declaration on Minorities does not have a definition of a minority, an omission that is made by the agreement of all States.

AHRC: This relates to the problem of the U.N. being a club of governments.

BOSE: Yes, yes. These are the problems, the inherent drawbacks, of the system which we need to change. What the Western governments are trying to do is one thing. Some of it is good; some of it is bad. Let us not be detracted though from the fact that these are also politically motivated initiatives.

AHRC: And economically motivated initiatives.

BOSE: Yes. This is a part of promoting free market policies, but I take courage from what happened in Seattle - the new coalition that has come up of people - and that is where we need to look to. We need to understand that increasingly rights are under threat everywhere. It's a matter of degree, and we need to get together - the human rights people need to get together. We need to build alliances across borders and work together.

AHRC: Thank you for your time, Tapan.