Bruce Van Voorhis

As about 150 of the world's leaders left the United Nations on Sept. 16 after their three-day conference in New York, the largest U.N. summit in history, they left disappointment in their wake. In the area of human rights, the "major achievement" of the summit was not to reject Secretary-General Kofi Annan's proposal for a U.N. Human Rights Council, which would elevate human rights to the same level as peace and development in the U.N. system, but to continue discussing its mandate and composition and to work to establish it within a year. It will be difficult to envisage any real improvement in the efforts of the United Nations to promote and protect human rights, however-regardless of its prominence in the U.N. structure-until the United Nations has the mandate and mechanisms it needs to implement its decisions to remedy human rights violations. It is highly unlikely that any U.N. council or other structure will have this capability until the collective political will arises to subsume a nation's sovereignty to the conclusions of a U.N. body-something that very few nations, whether rich or poor, large or small, are willing to surrender. As a result, the club of governments that comprise the United Nations will continue to speak about the need for reform of the organisation and their desire to work for the advancement of humankind but do very little.

In Asia, human rights defenders and activists should not despair, however, for the real arena of involvement where they and others can have more influence and can hope to achieve some degree of change is much closer to home than Geneva and New York-the national and local level. It is at these levels where human rights violations actually occur and where the political will and policy to respond to them are absent. It is at these levels where most legal systems that could protect human rights in Asia beg for reform, reform of the police, prosecution and judicial institutions that are frequently unprofessional and inefficient, corrupt and/or vulnerable to political influence or intimidation. Indeed, it is often the police or military or other agents of the State that are responsible for most of Asia's human rights violations, and the lack of redress provided by prosecutors and judges permits these violations to continue, fostering impunity as a result that only emboldens the perpetrators and generates fear among ordinary people and more and more abuses of their rights. Thus, without addressing the pressing reforms required of these institutions, there is little hope that Asia's human rights record will witness much improvement.

In reflecting on the stories devoted to India in this issue of Human Rights SOLIDARITY, for example, it is clear the country's legal system is suffering from unaccountable police officers, non-functional prison monitoring systems, long delays in delivering justice in the courts and a chronic apathy and disregard for international and domestic laws, constitutional protections and Supreme Court judgements safeguarding people's rights. In such an environment, it is not surprising that the cases of torture and starvation in India described in this Human Rights SOLIDARITY are not addressed.

Advocacy at the national and local level, however, does not ensure success as is evident by the stories in this magazine as well as decades of work by activists to improve human rights in the region, but it is at these levels where the real problems of human rights lie and where change is most likely to result in practical results for Asia's people. This emphasis on the national and local levels does not foreclose, of course, continuing efforts at the United Nations and other international fora to promote and protect human rights. However, the experience in Asia is that its governments tend to sign, ratify and ignore U.N. human rights covenants and conventions and to produce periodic reports for the various U.N. human rights committees that do not mirror reality.

Kofi Annan has rightly called on the United Nations and the world's human rights community to move from the Age of Articulation of rights of the past 60 years that has produced the U.N. covenants and conventions and to now move into the Age of Implementation of them. A place to usher in this new age is at the national and local level through the reform of Asia's legal systems so that they provide redress to people's suffering instead of contributing to it.