By Dr Bertrand Ramcharan,
Seventh Chancellor of the University of Guyana First Swiss Chair in International Human Rights Law, Geneva Graduate Institute
In my offerings in these pages, I have endeavoured to draw attention to international policies and strategies that can contribute to the process of nation-building in a Guyana of diverse ethnicities. It is in this spirit that, after reading some recent exchanges on the topic, I pen these lines as a contribution to the policy-discussion process.
The need for international policies on persons of African descent was brought to the halls of the United Nations in 2000 by the delegate of Jamaica, then participating in discussions in Geneva on the preparation of a draft declaration and programme of action for the then impending 2001 Durban world conference on racism, racism discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance. The Preparatory Committee for the world conference had before it a draft declaration and programme of action that had been penned by this author.
During the preparatory process, we in the Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had organized regional brain-storming meetings, including an Expert Seminar held in Santiago, Chile, to ventilate issues of racism and racial discrimination that deserved to be brought to the attention of the world conference. Numerous Afro-descendants from Latin American countries participated in the meeting and highlighted their ‘invisibility’. Addressing the closing meeting of the seminar, I was moved to say “He sentido su invisibilidad” – “I have felt your invisibility.”
The Seminar urged that the plan of action to come out of the Durban conference should include specific measures in favour of groups suffering discrimination, “including women, children, indigenous peoples, ‘African-Americans and people of African descent’, migrants, internally displaced persons, refugees, persons of mixed race, gypsies, the disabled, Jewish communities, Arab and Islamic communities, the elderly and minority groups”.
Specifically on ‘African-Americans and people of African descent’, the Expert Seminar recommended that national statistical agencies, regional bodies and UN agencies set up information systems to gather official statistics for development purposes in all countries in the region, “incorporating the African-American ethnic component so as to reveal the presence of communities and organizations of people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and incorporating gender and ethnicity components in all the resulting programmes.”
The Seminar urged States to set up affirmative action programmes in the public sector and to promote and follow-up on affirmative action in the private sector. To complement this, UN agencies were urged to add staff of African descent to their offices in the countries of the region so that those offices would truly represent the diversity and composition of the populations they dealt with.
The Seminar urged the UN to set up a specific programme of coordinated research with Afro-American study centres throughout the Americas, and some research centres on other continents, focusing on the population of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Seminar recommended that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights establish a position of special rapporteur on matters relating to people of African descent, and urged States, civil society and international bodies to recognize the distinctive characteristics of communities of people of African descent who were dependent on their ancestral lands for the preservation and upkeep of their cultural practices.
These recommendations were before, and influenced, the delegates at the Durban conference, held in August, 2001. In paragraph 34 of the Durban Declaration, the world conference stated the following: “We recognize that people of African descent have for centuries been victims of racism, racial discrimination and enslavement and of the denial by history of many of their rights, and assert that they should be treated with fairness and respect for their dignity and should not suffer discrimination of any kind. Recognition should therefore be given to their rights to culture and their own identity; to participate freely and in equal conditions in political, social, economic and cultural life; to development in the context of their own aspirations and customs; to keep, maintain and foster their own forms of organization, their mode of life, culture, traditions, and religious expressions, to maintain and use their own languages; to the protection of their traditional knowledge and their cultural and artistic heritage; to the use, enjoyment and conservation of their natural renewable resources of their habitat and to active participation in the design, implementation and development of educational systems and programme, including those of a specific and characteristic nature; and where applicable to their ancestrally inhabited land.”
Paragraphs 35 and 103 of the Durban declaration contained other expressions of concern and policy recommendations. In pursuance of these, and of the recommendations contained in the Durban programme of action, the United Nations established various follow-up mechanisms devoted to persons of African descent, including the establishment of a Working Group of the Human Rights Council on Persons of African Descent; the establishment of a Permanent Forum for Peoples of African Descent; and the declaration of an international year, followed by an International Decade for People of African Descent. The Decade lasts until the end of 2024 and will undoubtedly be followed by a second decade.
The resolution of the UN General Assembly bringing in the International Decade for People of African Descent established the following objectives:
To strengthen national, regional and international action and cooperation in relation to the full enjoyment of economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights by people of African descent and their full and equal participation in all aspects of society;
To promote a greater knowledge of, and respect for, the diverse heritage, culture and contribution of people of African descent to the development of societies;
To adopt and strengthen national regional and international legal frameworks in accordance with the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and to ensure their full and effective implementation.
As the International Decade for People of African Descent approaches its culmination, it would be appropriate for Guyana to compile and disseminate a report on activities undertaken in Guyana under the auspices of the Decade. Notwithstanding the fraught political and ethnic complexity of Guyana, it should be possible to compile such a report. Perhaps a High Court Judge might be entrusted with this task.
As a matter of public policy, it needs to be recognized also that there are at least four population groups in Guyana in respect of whom parallel reports should be complied: persons of indigenous ancestry – as the founding nation; persons of Indian ancestry; and persons of mixed ethnicity. When the international policies described above were developed, they could not, in the circumstances of an international conference, have in view a country with the complex history of Guyana with the coexistence of four major groups of the population.
National policies must be faithful to the international recommendations while being mindful of the specificities of the Guyanese situation, and while carving out policies and strategies so that the four main groups of the population can travel together while developing closer bonds along the journey.
Nation-building has to be cultivated bearing in mind the specificities of the four groups, and doing justice to all.
