UNITED NATIONS

The Vienna Conference

For the worldwide human rights movement, 1993 was notable in being the year of the second United Nations World Conference on Human Rights-the first having taken place twenty-five years earlier, when world conditions were markedly different and the human rights movements of many countries were in their infancy or not yet born. After preparatory conferences in the various regions, some 1,500 nongovernmental human rights organizations gathered in June in Vienna to review the state of human rights and to look ahead. The official conference of governments met separately from the nongovernmental groups, but both considered the same issues and both produced documents at the close of the conference.

Human Rights Watch sent several senior staff to Vienna and distributed two reports there. The Human Rights Watch Global Report on Prisons was a compilation of our work in twenty countries over a period of six years, and was issued as a call on the worldwide human rights movement and on U.N. bodies to stop averting their eyes from the horrifying conditions in which prisoners-a forgotten and profoundly vulnerable group in any society-must survive. The second report was titled The Lost Agenda: Human Rights and U.N. Field Operations. Focusing on the U.N. peace-making, humanitarian and peacekeeping operations in El Salvador, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Iraq, the report analyzed why incorporating human rights concerns was critical to the success of the El Salvador process; why unwillingness to seek accountability for ongoing abuses weakened the mission in Cambodia; and how the U.N. had failed to give human rights the necessary priority in the remaining three cases. The report was the first such cross-regional critique of the U.N.'s field performance from a human rights organization.

The meaning and impact of the Vienna conference appeared mixed. Although the conference was a welcome opportunity to gather monitors and governments together-and as such should take place more often than every twenty-five years-it also pointed up the areas of division that exist among governmental approaches to human rights. The argument of some authoritarian Asian governments thatdiffering cultural norms should exempt their countries from the universal application of international human rights instruments was one flashpoint of discussion. There was also a perception, among countries of the South, that the U.N. had not adequately addressed their human rights priorities where those priorities involved economic, social and cultural rights, but had rather responded to an agenda of the developed, westernized North which emphasized predominantly civil and political rights.

Among the nongovernmental groups, such divisions were far less pronounced, although the issue of economic and social rights as priorities was widely discussed. In clear contrast to their governments, Asian and other Southern human rights organizations embraced the universality of human rights law. Particularly notable was the strength of women's groups from around the world and virtually unanimous criticism of the U.N.'s existing human rights machinery. The NGO Forum comprising all the human rights groups participating in the conference produced a strong position paper in which three elements stood out: first, that human rights, for the U.N., must mean all five categories of human rights; second, that women's basic rights must be fully integrated into the U.N.'s human rights agenda, beginning with the appointment of a Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women; and third, that the U.N. General Assembly must create a High Commissioner for Human Rights, to ensure that a human rights component is included in all the U.N.'s developmental, humanitarian and peacekeeping work and that the U.N. can become capable of early warning and flexible action on human rights crises.