Americans looking at us

Stephen Vasciannie

DURING THE course of last week, two important documents published by the United States Government were brought to public attention in Jamaica. The first, the "Jamaica Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1998", published by the State Department, provides a summary of Jamaica's human rights record for 1997, through the eyes of American officials. The second, the "International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 1998", also prepared by the Department of State, summarises, inter alia, relations between Jamaica and the United States on drug trafficking matters, and, importantly, confirms that Jamaica has been certified as a cooperative country in the fight against drugs. Even on cursory examination, the value of the Country Report on Human Rights Practices is clearly evident. In several respects, the report repeats matters which are in the domain of public information. Thus, while it indicates that the Government of Jamaica "generally respects the human rights of its citizens", it also highlights the fact that in 1998, "members of the security forces committed extrajudicial killings and beatings and carried out arbitrary arrests and detentions". Among other things, the Report also highlights our poor prison and jail conditions, the resource problems in our judicial system, the "large and widening gap between the wealthy and the impoverished" and the "widespread discrimination on the basis of political opinion in the distribution of scarce governmental benefits, including employment, especially in the garrison communities." Specific In some instances, the Report is also very specific. It points out, for instance, that, in connection with the 1997 Tivoli incident, during which four unarmed persons (three women and a child) were killed, the Jamaica Defence Force "refused to make public the results of its own inquiry, which possibly might have shed further light on the incident". Or again, in connection with an episode in March 1997 in the Grants Pen area, in which the police said there was a shootout but some residents claimed an assassination, the Report observes laconically: "forensic evidence in the form of bullet holes and human blood and tissue found on a nearby wall apparently were more consistent with the allegations by area residents that members of the security forces placed the three men against the wall and shot them." It should not be believed, however, that the Report is simply a litany of abuse or institutional failure. On the contrary, in some places, the authors of the Report accentuate the positive: for instance, without any adverse qualifications, the Report asserts that freedom of speech and of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly and association are respected by the Government in practice, and there were no reports of forced return of asylum seekers to "a country where they feared persecution". Criticisms But, though, generally speaking, I regard the Report as a useful document, it is open to at least two substantial criticisms. For a start, by its very nature, the Report is the result of a subjective selection of items, made presumably by American representatives in Jamaica and by persons in the State Department assigned to monitoring Jamaica. Consequently, it will, perhaps inevitably, miss a number of human rights issues of importance from the Jamaican perspective. So, for example, the Report is silent on the important human rights issues which, in Jamaica,

have come to be associated with the question of hanging. This is not to suggest that the Report ought necessarily to have taken a position on whether hanging, as contemplated in Jamaica, is inconsistent with basic human rights standards. Nor is it even to suggest that hanging, as contemplated in Jamaica, necessarily raises human rights issues. The truth is, however, that, in Jamaica, the main human rights agency, the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights, as well as other bodies such as Amnesty International, take the view that hanging should be abolished in Jamaica on human rights grounds. This fact, together with Jamaica's withdrawal from the First Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, must be listed among the main human rights issues for Jamaicans in 1997. Bearing in mind that the announcement of Jamaica's withdrawal from the First Optional Protocol was made in October 1997, and bearing in mind that our withdrawal meant that Jamaicans would lose the right to make appeals to the United Nations on a range of human rights questions, the absence of any reference to the hanging debate and to the withdrawal from the First Optional Protocol, seems somewhat arbitrary, at best. The second criticism, which relates as much to the Human Rights Report as it does to the Narcotics Report, is more fundamental. It stems from the question: why should the United States take unto itself the right publicly to judge actions in other countries, whether in the area of human rights, drug trafficking or otherwise? One aspect of the answer sometimes given to this question is that such reports are mandated by the United States Congress they are prepared not out of any sense of American hegemony or superiority, but primarily as a means of information-gathering for informed policy-making. This response, though not altogether misleading, is not a full answer to the criticism raised. More specifically, while the reports are indeed helpful for policy-making purposes, it is difficult to avoid the notion that the United States prepares such reports partly as a result of its own sense of international superiority. Otherwise, it would have been open to the United States to rely on the United Nations or regional bodies such as the Organisation of American States to perform the important function of information-gathering. Not only that, in the case of the Narcotics Report, we know in Jamaica that decertification one possible consequence arising from the contents of the Report is sometimes used as a threat to prompt certain actions on the part of individual States. Thus, one has the perception that the Reports themselves have become tools of foreign policy. The result is that, although the Reports are meant to encourage laudable objectives observance of human rights, reduction in drug trafficking sometimes they also serve to raise the nationalistic sensibilities of individual States, and thus undermine these laudable objectives. So then, should we welcome these reports? Notwithstanding the criticisms mentioned above, I believe the Human Rights Report certainly helps to reinforce efforts towards a greater recognition of human rights, in Jamaica and elsewhere. I am, however, less supportive of the Narcotics Report, not because I doubt the value of the information contained therein, but rather because of the link between this report and automatic decertification. The process of decertification means, in effect, that the United States sits in judgement of other countries, and may, as it sees fit, apply the decertification sanctions (cutting off aid, voting against loans from the IMF and so on) in order to bring the others in line. But, in the matter of drug trafficking, the United States, as the world's largest market for illicit drugs, does not exactly have clean hands. On what basis can it decertify others, and not face the response that the problem comes not only from drug producers, and transit States, but also from the consumers? Perhaps if the decertification process were kept separate from the process of informationgathering concerning drug trafficking, more countries would sincerely accept the International Narcotics Report as a valuable tool for international co-operation against the drug menace. Stephen Vasciannie is an attorney-at-law and spokesman for the NDM. His views, however, are not necessarily of those of the NDM nor of the UWI, Mona, where he works.

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/19990308/cleisure/c3.html