Health, Human Rights and the United Nations

Inconsistent Aims and Inherent Contradictions?

Theodore Macdonald, Diane Plamping

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315346908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

'In the light of impending environmental catastrophe, people all over the world, in all walks of life, are becoming more aware of the pressing need to act globally. The need to base our decisions and actions less on parochial national advantage, sequestered in hate and suspicion of other nation's playing the same game of Russian roulette, have to give way to a new appreciation of the fact that our global village is indeed so very small and perilously frail. We depend upon one another as never before and, unless we insure the health and human rights of all, we shall surely each perish individually...' In "Health, Human Rights and the United Nations", Theodore H MacDonald carefully analyses the origin, development and structure of the United Nations (UN) and its key agencies, and considers its capacity to mediate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He takes a detailed look into human rights abuses in Sudan's Darfur province, Burma, Liberia, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the United Kingdom. By investigating the development of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the pressures being brought to bear upon it, MacDonald exposes contradictions in the aims of both the WHO and the UN. Does the current global political scene and its neoliberal policies nullify the work of both? Is the UN fit for purpose? Can drastic reforms result in equitable solutions? Can a new trans-national body be developed, to arbitrate global trade, health, human rights and fiscal issues? This remarkable book is ideal for anyone interested in international law, human rights, global health, public health and health promotion. Public health and health promotion professionals, including international healthcare organisations, care agencies, and international charities will find the analysis enlightening. It is also of great interest to policy makers and shapers in communities and government, political activists and all those with an interest in equality and globalisation.

Chapter 1

Our partially paralysed United Nations

People with no human rights

Despite the two world wars of the twentieth century, and attempts to organize world affairs in such a way as to guarantee human rights by a multitude of international agreements, including the pivotal UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, millions of the world’s peoples are – even in areas free of war – denied access to primary healthcare. In subsequent chapters we shall examine some of these defects in the ‘system.’ To do this, we shall have to analyse the apparent inability of the UN to intervene to protect people’s rights. However, by way of introduction let us consider first a few real cases, as they illustrate at least five main criticisms of the UN, as summarised below:

1 an apparent reluctance to ‘violate’ national integrity to protect the human rights of individuals or subpopulations within a nation’s borders

2 hesitation on the part of the UN to intervene if doing so would be politically embarrassing or disadvantageous for one of the larger nations

3 inflexibility on the part of UN staff themselves, with such staff even taking advantage of their position to abuse people in their care. Examples abound in several less developed countries

4 use of the UN Security Council to promote the real politics of powerful nations whilst ignoring widespread ongoing gross violations of the human rights of whole populations

5 use of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to put the financial advantages of powerful pharmaceutical transnational corporations (TNCs) ahead of World Health Organization (WHO) dictates with regard to making treatment for HIV/ AIDS universally available where needed.

All of the above compromise, or even eliminate, the basic human rights to primary healthcare (PHC), on which all the other human rights depend.

In this book, the author will consider in detail just five cases, not because they are the only ones, but because each of them illustrates salient points about the UN’s ability to protect human rights. This will hopefully enable us to consider methods of improving the transnational mediation of the present glaring global inequities in human rights.

To illustrate some of the points raised above, let us consider the following excerpts and testimonies. The author regrets to say that he has hundreds on file and receives dozens more a week. The selection here is eclectic.

Child soldiers

Consider the UNICEF 2005 Report, The State of the World’s Children.¹ Most readers are already familiar with the use of children as combatants in the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, but the practice is much more widespread than that, involving active conflict in at least 55 countries just between 1990 and 2004. These children are generally kidnapped from remote areas of the country concerned, and often from residential schools or orphanages. A widespread misapprehension is that only boys are exploited in this regard, but the UNICEF report makes it clear that this is by no means the case. The children themselves have to be ‘conditioned’ – usually by brutality and by the forcible administration of drugs – before they can take to torturing and killing other people. This itself not only violates almost every article of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and its subsequent Convention on the Rights of the Child (both explained in detail in Chapter 2), but is bound to have an impact on the child’s future mental health, even if he or she is eventually rescued. Even more ruthless (if that is possible) is the practice in Burma of using children to walk in front of the real soldiers in order to detonate any mines that may be present.

Studies indicate that girls are primary targets for abduction during armed conflict, with the objective of forcing them to become warriors or sexual and domestic partners. Although precise figures are not available, it is clear that this type of abduction takes place worldwide. Over the past decade, girls have been kidnapped and forced into wartime service in at least 20 countries, including Angola, Burundi, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Uganda in sub-Saharan Africa, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru in Latin America, Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste in Asia, and the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Turkey in Europe.

Abduction is not the only cause of girls’ participation in armed conflict. Girls are sometimes given into armed service by their parents as a form of ‘tax payment’, as happens in Columbia or Cambodia, or for other reasons. After the rape of his 13-year-old daughter, a Kosovo Albanian refugee father gave her away to the Kosovo Liberation Army. ‘She can do to the Serbs what they have done to us’, he said. ‘She will probably be killed, but that would be for the best. She would have no future anyway after what they did to her.’

Some girls may also choose to become part of an armed group. However, their choice is largely a matter of survival. Given the high levels of physical and sexual abuse of girls in most current armed conflicts, taking up arms can be safer than waiting to be raped, injured or killed.

Furthermore, the supply systems of warring groups may be the only source of food, shelter and security available to children in war-affected areas. To describe their enlistment as ‘voluntary’ is both misleading and erroneous.

Denial of access to effective HIV/AIDS treatments

Antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) can now, in almost all cases, allow victims of HIV/AIDS to live effective lives. However, as this author has pointed out in a previous book,² powerful pharmaceutical corporations have successfully used the World Trade Organization (WTO) to prevent countries from producing generic copies of commercially available ARVs, thus condemning hundreds of thousands of the world’s poor to distorted, broken and short lives. All too often in such situations, parents die before their young children, leaving such children – despite their tender years – to look after their siblings as best they can.

This obviously constitutes both a most blatant violation of the right of the actual victim to PHC, and the abrogation of children’s rights to education. The following two accounts from UNICEF³ illustrate these points. Both are drawn from Mozambique, but are amply replicated in many other less developed countries (LDCs).

Celina possesses a calm dignity. She holds her head high, her hair is neatly braided, her large eyes look directly at you when she speaks. She rarely smiles, but when she does, her smile is beautiful. It has been two days since the family of six has eaten, but when Celina is given money by an aid worker to go to the market to buy basic food items, her aunt panics. Twelve-year-old Celina is looking after her aunt, Margarida Araujo, and her three-year-old cousin, Paulo. Celina’s three other siblings are not at home that afternoon.

The aunt’s hollow eyes look scared. Her breathing quickens. Her face grimaces with pain. Her emaciated body is covered by a grubby old sheet, and she is too weak to speak. She can only lie there on an old mat, in front of their family’s crumbling mud hut, and look on as Celina disappears through the overgrown weeds. Her aunt is not the only person who is upset. Paulo, who had been sitting on Celina’s tiny lap, is screaming hysterically at being left behind.

However, Celina has no choice – food is critical now for the survival of the family. The children are all hungry, and Margarida is dying from AIDS-related illnesses, including tuberculosis, as well as from severe malnutrition. ‘I haven’t taken my TB tablets for five days, because I’m too hungry’, she says in a faint voice. ‘The pills have strong side-effects if taken without food’, she adds, with tears rolling down her cheeks.

Margarida is only 20 years old, but she has not had much of a youth herself. She dropped out of school when she was 15 to look after her own parents, who she says were ill for a long time before they died. Margarida was married, but she has no children of her own. The children who are living with her are the offspring of her three sisters, all of whom died of AIDS. Three years ago, when Margarida herself became ill, her husband abandoned her. Margarida and the children live in a tiny mud hut, a 15-minute walk from the main road and reachable only by foot along overgrown pathways. Inside, the hut is dank and empty, and when it rains water leaks from the roof. The family’s only belongings are some old rusty pots and a few clothes.

Excerpt from Burma (Myanmar)

Refugee International, a non-government organization (NGO), has a vast body of experience in documenting health and other human rights abuses consequent upon people fleeing persecution in their own countries.⁴ The following case reflects the dire human rights situation in Burma (Myanmar), especially with regard to its ethnic minorities. The Burmese situation is rendered more impervious to resolution by the UN because of the economic dependence of China and Russia on Burmese oil and gas supplies. As detailed in Chapter 2, Russia and China – both of which have the veto in the UN Security Council – vetoed a US proposal censuring Burma’s human rights violations in January 2007.

As an example of the dangers that women face while trying to reach safety in Thailand, I want to share with you the story of Thay Yu, a Karen mother in her forties who was fleeing to Thailand because of oppression by the military in her village. Near the border of Thailand, a group of six Burmese soldiers caught one of the families travelling with her. It was a family of four, consisting of the parents, a nursing baby and a six-year-old girl. Thay Yu hid in a nearby bush, and while soldiers killed the baby with a blow to the back of the neck, others raped the mother while forcing the husband to watch. After killing the mother by stabbing her through her vagina with a bamboo pole, they shot the husband. The six-year-old girl ran away and hid in a tree, where Thay Yu found her and brought her to Thailand after burying the bodies of her parents. This gruesome story is one of many documented accounts. The treatment of ethnic minorities by State Police and Development Council (SPDC) soldiers is inhumane beyond description.

Widespread rape and human rights abuses against ethnic minorities are committed with impunity both by officers and by lower-ranking soldiers. Officers committed the majority of the rapes documented in which the rank of the perpetrator is known. The culture of impunity contributes to the military atmosphere in which rape is permissible. It also leads to the conclusion that the system for protecting civilians is faulty, which in turn suggests that rape is systematic. Due to the well-known impunity with regard to rape, survivors and their families are extremely reluctant to complain about rape. In the rare cases where victims or their families actually do complain to military officials, army personnel often respond with violence. In only two of the 43 cases that Refugees International documented were the perpetrators punished, and these punishments were extremely lenient (e.g. the payment of 1000 Kyat or the equivalent of one US dollar).

As an example of the impunity granted to soldiers, I want to share the story of Naw My Doh, who told us that she saw soldiers take her sister away from their home and transport her to their military camp. She heard her sister calling for her brother and father to help her because ‘they are raping me.’ They could do nothing to help her. A day after her sister was taken, the soldiers brought her body back for the family to bury. Her wounds clearly indicated that she had been raped, perhaps to death. Despite the fact that the soldiers continued to return to their village after the murder, Naw Mu Doh and her family were too afraid to complain. One month later, her father was killed by the army.

According to Refugees International’s conversations with more than 150 people along the Thai/Burmese border over a period of one month, women from ethnic-minority groups along Burma’s eastern border experience rape at the hands of Burma’s army on a consistent and frequent basis.

Sexual abuse by UN personnel

During the last few months of 2006, such media outlets as the Murdoch Press, ITN and FOX News – and hence much of the UK and other EU media – prominently featured attacks on Kofi Annan, the General Secretary of the UN. This was discussed by the present author in some detail in a previous book.⁵ In the present context, it is sufficient to mention that one of the complaints featured against the UN involved a number of incidents, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which UN personnel were raping vulnerable women under their protection. The NGO Refugees International has kept records of such abuses – both by UN personnel and by other NGO personnel in close cooperation with UN peacekeepers. In a report issued on 23 January 23 2007,⁶ Refugees International stated that:

Sexual misconduct has long characterized UN peacekeeping missions. During the UN mission in Cambodia (UNTAC) from 1992 to 2003, the number of sex houses and ‘Thai-style’ massage parlours multiplied and the number of prostitutes rose from 6,000 to 25,000, including an increased number of child prostitutes. Cambodia’s HIV rates rose and sexually transmitted infections spread among Cambodian prostitutes. Cambodians complained to the UN mission about UNTAC personnel’s disorderly behaviour, drinking and association with prostitutes. The mission’s Special Representative to the Secretary-General (SRSG), Yasushi Akashi, infamously replied, ‘Boys will be boys’, and no disciplinary action was taken.

The following brief excerpt⁷ from the testimony of a 14-year-old Liberian girl is germane in this regard.

When ma asked me to go to the stream to wash plates, a peacekeeper asked me to take off my clothes so that he could take a picture. When I asked him to give me money he told me, no money for children, only biscuit. It is difficult to escape the trap of the NGO people; they use the food as bait to get you to have sex with them.

With respect to the above, however, the question arises as to the administrative link between the UN (as the peace-keeping agency) and its employees in the field. Present restrictions on the UN, as a world body, and the appointment of its field workers in any given country have to be drawn from the local population. Their fitness for the job is decided only locally. The UN administrative apparatus in New York has little or no direct control. In fact, when this author needed to track down a particular peacekeeper in Côte d’Ivoire in 2003, the UN’s Personnel Office in New York could not help. I had to make inquiries to NGOs working with the UN in Côte D’Ivoire itself. Also, many such UN peacekeepers only work for 2 or 3 months in that context before taking up employment elsewhere. This, of course, does not absolve the UN, but suggests that any reform of the world body has to involve a tighter control over the selection ad retention of its peacekeepers.

Human trafficking

Another serious area of widespread loss of human rights involves the thousands of individ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Our partially paralysed United Nations
• 2 The UN and human rights
• 3 The Darfur crisis
• 4 The well-hidden regime of Myanmar
• 5 Human rights in the context of conflict
• 6 The Palestinians
• 7 Human rights violations in the UK
• 8 WHO mediates the global right to health?
• 9 Can the UN promote the WHO’s objectives?
• 10 Transnational advocacy and mediation
• Index