On Human Rights and Peacekeeping

Madam President, as you are aware, this year marks six decades of United Nations work on Human Rights and Peacekeeping. In particular, May 29 th provides us all with a special opportunity to pay tribute to the work of International Peacekeepers, as it is International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers.

On the occasion of the 40 th Anniversary of the United Nations Charter on Human Right on Human Rights in 1988, the President of France at the time, Mr. Francois Mitterand, hosted an International Symposium on Human Rights at the Palais des Chaillot in Paris , France . For those of us who participated in the Symposium, we became even more aware of a perennially vexing and worrisome reality: National Constitutions around the world have excellent human rights provisions, but continue to face a crisis of implementation. Nearly 20 percent of the Constitution of Liberia is devoted to the fundamental rights of persons under Chapter III. These fundamental rights are enshrined in the United Nations Charter on Human Rights.

Were these fundamental rights to have been respected and promoted in Liberia and elsewhere in the world, violence would not have gained primacy in attending to conflicts. From state repressive and violent response to legitimate peaceful demands of citizens for state protection of their fundamental rights to illegal detention to massive unemployment and pervasive poverty, flagrant abuses of human rights have displayed the injustice that became the principal pretext for civil war.

It is against his background that principal priority must be given to the promotion of justice. It is essentially the presence of justice that prevents violent crisis and leads to peace. The presence of justice is seen when the fundamental rights of the people, as enshrined in the Constitution, are respected and promoted.

This Anniversary of the Commemoration of the United Nations Charter on Human Rights provides us all, particularly the state, with yet another opportunity to demonstrate commitment to respecting and protecting fundamental human rights. In this direction, urgent attention must be paid to the plight of persons under illegal detention and dismissal from employment. While it is crucial to pay attention to the political rights of the people, the economic and social rights of the people remain highly important. The state has to be very mindful of the high importance of economic and social rights because high unemployment and mass poverty are pretexts for violent civil crisis. In the midst of the current food price crisis the World Bank President declared nearly two months ago that the crisis could lead to social unrest and war especially as over 100 million people were faced with starvation. Yet, the State continues to operate on the basis of dominant policies of global institutions that lead to social unrest and war.

There are those who continue to blame peacekeepers for perennial violent crisis for civil wars, contending that the peacekeepers do not do a good job and that is why they have to keep coming back to handle recurrent crisis. This criticism of peacekeepers is not justified. The criticism should go on the governance arrangement in states with violent experiences. The peacekeepers create peaceful spaces in which state governance, if committed to peace, could institutionalize sustainable justice for all. It is essentially this sustainable justice that leads to peace, making it unnecessary for the peacekeepers to return.

We in Liberia must see the presence of the peacekeepers as representing the last opportunity for the opening of a peaceful space in which to build sustainable justice. In the face of competing demands for peacekeepers around the world and the attending high cost of peacekeeping, we Liberians must be seized with a deep sense of urgency to act together now for the building of sustainable justice that leads to peace.