The speakers to the conference were: Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance; Dr. Alejo Vidal-Quadras, Vice President of the European Parliament; Struan Stevenson, President of the Delegation for Relations with Iraq in the European Parliament (presenter of European proposal for Ashraf crisis); Ruth N. Wedgwood , jurist; Sid Ahmed Ghozali, former prime minister of Algeria; Nontombi Tutu, human rights activist and the daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu; Madeleine Rees, Secretary General of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Christiane Perregaux, co-President of the Legislative Council in Geneva; Gianfranco Fattorini, Co-Chair of Movement against Racism and for Friendship among the Peoples (MRAP); Marc Falquet, Member of Geneva Parliament; and Daniel Neeser, pastor. The conference was presided over by Michel Joli, Secretary General of Mitterrand Foundation (France Libertés).
Below is speech by Ruth N. Wedgwood , jurist:
Thank you very much Mr. Chairman and dear colleagues. It’s a privilege to be back in Geneva where I used to wile away my time for eight to nine weeks a year sitting on the Human Rights Committee, taking country reports, trying to survey whether they were complying with the obligations under the covenant of civil and political rights. Those obligations however are also inherent in the UN charter in articles 55 and 56, so even countries that haven’t signed the covenant on civil and political rights are also still bound to obey the demand that one respect the right to life, the right against torture, the right to humane treatment of all persons.
And therefore I think my presence here today, in a very real sense, is a continuation of that work. Now if you haven’t seen the statement of the High Commissioner for Refugees, you should. This is sort of the Magna Carta of what I hope will be the future of better treatment at Ashraf and the people of Ashraf as they make their lives in other venues, and which the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has indeed recognized that these folks are under United Nations legal protection.
Camp residents who have submitted requests are, accordingly, now formally asylum seekers under international law, whose claims require adjudication. And international law requires that they must be able to benefit from basic protection of their security and well-being. In plain English, that means “don’t tread on me”. There is now a bubble of – at least UN promise around each person in Ashraf.
And I think the challenge for the UN – and we’re all about the same age in this room except a few young’uns. We lived through so many massacres: in Rwanda, in Trebiniza. To have another one – three strikes we’re out! It really is just unacceptable to have forewarning, what ever one’s view of the merits, of the people and of the cause. That doesn’t matter. You can’t have the UN present with forewarning, doing nothing and have R2P responsibility to protect, survive as a viable concept, an idea that was put forward by Kofi Annan and has been adopted by Ban ki Moon.
So, I would put to you that at least in legal terms, as well as moral terms, each person in that camp now is under formal UN legal protection. And there is a right to have a preliminary measure, essentially an injunction against either Maliki himself or some of the gentle persons he may allow in across the border to do dirty work against the camp.
Now on the idea of observers, they have been used in many prior situations. UNMOs, UN military observers. They are not armed. They were used in the Provlaka peninsula. They’ve been used in many situations. They of course exposed themselves to some vulnerability. That comes with the territory of choosing to discharge this role. But it’s not as if the UN has never done this before. Their instructions may be to report and retreat, but they’re there to report, and to avoid any question of what happened, any suggestion that film is not accurate, and frankly, to bear moral witness.
As Madam Tutu here knows from her own experience in South Africa, being a nonviolent observer has a great power, perhaps greater in many respects than the force of arms. I’m struck always by the fact that we’re meeting here in the Palais des Nations. This was the organization that didn’t prevent WWII. It is an organization that too often has an attitude of “the buck slipped for your comment, pass it along”, as opposed to taking action. It’s an institution where it’s very har