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Justice and human rights for all - the key to peace and a sustainable world

by Clare Short MP (British Labour Party Politician) at the BMICH on October 9, 2004

Clare Short, MP making her address.

I am deeply honoured to have been invited to deliver the fifth Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial lecture. I, sadly, did not have the honour of meeting Neelan Tiruchelvam but I knew of him and of the fine values to which he dedicated his life, and of his terrible untimely death. This lecture provides me with an opportunity to show my respect for him and his work by trying to share with you a commitment to live by and advocate the values by which he lived and for which he gave his life.

My purpose today is to argue that the only way in which the current world can be managed and sustained is through a greater commitment to justice and human rights for all. Of course, almost all people and governments claim to believe in justice and human rights.

Dr Neelan Tiruchelvan

These - almost sacred - worlds trip off the tongue very easily. But we have only to reflect on the poverty, inequality, oppression and violence that afflict our world, to understand that very many people have no access to justice or respect for their human rights.

I believe that we are living at a time of great challenge and great opportunity. Our generation, like every previous generation has a duty to reach out to the poor and the needy and to seek justice and the reduction of suffering. All the great world religions impose such obligations upon their adherents.

And all moral teachings require a respect for justice and the equal worth of each person. But our generation has a greater obligation than previous generations because we are living at a time when humanity has the capacity to eliminate extreme poverty from the human condition.

And in addition, we are living at a time when poverty, inequality and environmental degradation threaten the future of everyone, whether they are rich or poor, or live in the North or South.

It is often argued that what is morally right is rarely politically attractive. Whether or not that was true in the past, it is true no longer. If we fail to make progress in reducing poverty and sharing the earth's environmental resources more equitably, we are heading for turmoil and catastrophe and that will cause great suffering to all.

Little did we realise in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and Nelson Mandela was released from prison, what a challenge this new era would pose. At that time, a wave of hope and optimism spread across the world. We dreamed of a reduction of defence spending, the end of apartheid and a new global community committed to development and mutual respect.

And for a few years it did seem as though we were making progress with velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe, Reagan and Gorbachev agreeing large scale nuclear disarmament and Nelson Mandela - the greatest politician of our generation - elected as President of South Africa.

But there were also warning signs - a terrible genocide in Rwanda in 1994 when 1 million people were massacred in 100 days; and despite the UN mission in Rwanda sending repeated warnings the Security Council refused to act, thus breaching their obligations under the Genocide Convention., And in the Balkans, former Communist leader reached for ethnic nationalism and ethnic hatred in order to keep themselves in power.

This led to large scale ethnic cleansing, mass rape and a very ineffectual international response. The end of the Cold War also led to a withdrawal of interest in Africa.

Aid spending was cut and international engagement was withdrawn and in many countries in the poorest continent weak states with bloated armies descended into civil war, causing growing impoverishment and suffering. And thus in the post Cold War world we moved from and avoidance of conflict through a threat of Mutually Assured Destruction to a deeply disturbing proliferation of civil war and ethnic and religious conflict across the world.

All of this seems very primitive and very depressing - Hutu versus Tutsi, Serb versus Bosnian, pastoral Darfurian versus agricultural Darfurian and so on. Far from a new world order, we seem to be generating a new world of disorder with a growth of religious fanaticism fanning the flames of hatred and conflict.

And thus we see a growth of Hindu fundamentalism in India leading to strains and tension and terrible violence in Gujerat, Christian fundamentalism in the USA leading to a significant grouping in President Bush's coalition of support believing that there must be a Jewish state in historical Palestine before the Messiah returns and the righteous ascend into heaven; the rise of Osama bin Laden who seeks to resist the oppression of Muslim peoples through a jihad that justifies the targeting of innocent civilians; and Jewish fundamentalists settling on territory occupied by force and claiming that their right to oppress and murder Palestinians flows from their Holy Book which shows that God assigned this land to them.

There has been too little discussion of why this post Cold War globalising era has generated such an outbreak of fanaticism in the world's great religions. In the case of Rwanda and Darfur, it is clearly partly the ancient cause of desperate poverty which makes people believe they will be able to dominate the land and live better if they can eliminate another group. But in the case of India, the USA and Israel the cause is not poverty.

Is it perhaps a desperate search to assert identity in a world of rapid change where globalisation seems to be shaking and changing old certainties and creating a sense of insecurity across the world? It is also a reflection of a breakdown of international order, a commitment to international law and respect for human rights.

My view is that we are living at a time of massive historical change and in an era which contains the promise of great historical advance, but the world lacks both the political and intellectual leadership to understand what is possible and instead we are moving backwards into conflict, hatred and division.

This is dangerous and ugly in itself, but unless we change direction, it is likely that the bloodshed and bitterness will get worse and that respect for international law, the rule of law and human rights will deteriorate even further.

We are living in an era when the old order - the Cold War order - has broken down. And globalisation is generating a great unease at the speed with which everything is changing.

But the era also has enormous potential for advance if we are willing to share the capital, knowledge and technology we now have available, we could see the biggest and speediest reduction of poverty that humanity has ever seen. I think this era is comparable - but on a global scale - to the potential of the period of the industrial revolution for Europe and North America.

Thus in the 1820s, in my constituency in Birmingham, people poured in from deep poverty in the countryside of England to live in squalor and poverty, disease and illiteracy, to work in the new factories. Enormous new wealth was being created by the new technologies; the question was how was it to be shared?

The next 100 years saw a struggle for democracy, the right to organise in trade unions and form political parties committed to sharing the wealth in order to offer the chance of a decent life for all. I believe that this era offers the same potential to the world but we need to generate the political movements, leadership and ideas that enable us to manage this era in a way that will benefit humanity.

However, the current growth of ethnic and religious division could hold back our capacity to develop the potential of this era. But on this there are contradictory developments. Improved communications mean that people witness the suffering of others and call out for the Kosovan refugees, the students in Tiananmen Square, the little girl born in the tree during the Mozambiquan floods in March 2000.

People identify with each other regardless of ethnicity and geography. And thus the Universal Declaration of Human Rights becomes an emotional reality.

I have described the growth of religious fanaticism and conflict but at the same time people are moving across the world in ever greater numbers and in the great cities of the world people of different ethnic origins and religion often live comfortably side by side in mutual respect and friendship.

In my constituency in Birmingham, there is a rich diversity of people. My origins are that my great, great grandfather came to Birmingham to escape the famines of the 1840s which decimated Ireland. Birmingham was one of the early centres of the industrial revolution and therefore always drew in people who came from elsewhere to work and in the hope of a better life.

In the 1930s there was a great worldwide recession, but it was the beginnings of the car industry in Birmingham so people came from Ireland, Scotland and Wales for work., In the 1950s and 1960s after the Second World War, Britain had full employment and insufficient workers and people were recruited from Commonwealth countries, from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Caribbean.

And since then with the growing turbulence and mobility of the world, we have refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and many other places. Thus in my constituency as in many UK cities, the majority of people originate from countries that were colonised by Britain. I think someone labelled this as the South settling in the North.

This is also an aspect of globalisation and it contains within it something very fine. It means that within an area of about five square miles, we have cathedrals of the Church of England and Catholic Church, which for centuries persecuted each other.

There are also the headquarters of Methodism and other non-established churches that in their time we also persecuted. Since the 1960s have been added African Caribbean churches, Gurdwaras - reflecting all the caste and other groupings that are clustered in Ladywood. We have small local mosques, bigger mosques and Birmingham Central Mosque.

We have small Buddhist shrines and now a very fine new Pagoda. And we have the children of all these communities in local schools together celebrating each other's festivals and learning to understand and respect each other's religion. We even have a mosque which was funded by Iraqi money which was known as the Saddam Hussein mosque, whichstayed untouched through both the 1991 and 2003 wars.

I say all of this not just to describe to you the enjoyable and fine diversity of my city, but in the face of the ethnic conflict and division that we have seen elsewhere -including, tragically, here in Sri Lanka - I want to remind us that it is possible for people of different ethnicities and religious backgrounds and commitment to live together in mutual respect and to learn to be bigger and finer people because they learn from each other to understand so much better the diversity of human history and human experience.

We also have children of our city in Guantanamo Bay. Three from just North of the city have been released and have dreadful stories to tell of how they were treated. But Moazzam Begg remains and his father campaigns for the release of his son with enormous dignity.

And the overwhelming bulk of the people of the city are sympathetic and have great respect for this dignified and distressed father who simply asks for justice, and a proper trial if his son has done anything wrong.

In these circumstances, we also see a rise of Islamaphobia and the Muslim population of Birmingham are feeling distressed and insecure. But as I keep saying to them, it is important to remember most of the people of Birmingham and of the whole of Europe feel basically the same as they do about the war in Iraq.

And again and again I stress to all in our city that a multicultural city like ours cannot afford to become divided, otherwise we shall all be in trouble. And in this sense Birmingham is a microcosm of the world we are in. If we continue to become more divided, we shall all be in trouble.

On top of this new world disorder, we have great poverty and great wealth side by side in a world where the new technologies mean that the poor of the world see how the others live and are entitled to be disgruntled and angry. There are 6 billion of us now sharing this small planet of ours.

In 1900 there were just over 1 billion of us. By 1960 there were 3 billion and now we are 6 billion. The projections are that there will be 8-9 billion of us by 2030-50 when world population will stabilise. This growth in world population is a reflection of development. As life gets better, people live longer and more children survive so population grows rapidly before it stabilises.

Thus in Britain the population was about 10 million in 1700 and is now nearly 60 million. This wave of change is rolling across the world, but it means there are a lot more of us sharing the precious, finite environmental resources of the world and it helps to explain some of the strain. At the same time, humanity is urbanising.

For the first time in human history, more than half of us live in cities and the projection is that this will reach 60-65% in another 15-20 years. I believe this will have political consequences.

The urban poor living in the vast growing slums of the developing world are likely to be less patient than were the rural poor as they contrast their lives with the material wealth available in the OECD countries. Of the 6 billion of us who share this planet, 1 in 5 lives in extreme poverty - with too little to eat, little access to education or healthcare, no guarantee of clean water and a constant struggle to survive and fend off ill health.

Half of humanity has no access to sanitation - a cause of humiliation as well as ill health in our rapidly urbanising world. And across the world environmental resources are under strain, fish stocks are declining, desertification and land degradation is spreading, forests are being destroyed, we are losing masses of the bio-diversity that nature has given to us and global warming is now an accepted as a dangerous reality by almost all the world experts.

Global warming will cause great turbulence in weather pattern and strain on all countries, but as ever the poor will suffer most and low lying lands and islands will be wiped out across the world. I will take one example which helps bring home to us what it will mean. Bangladesh, the largest least developed country in the world will increase its population by 50 per cent and lose about one third of its territory over the next 30 years.

(To be Continued)

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