Amnesty International, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, expressed disappointment that India along with other emerging global powerhouses Brazil and South Africa, with all their newly-gained bargaining power, had failed to take the lead on human rights issues in a year marked by the failure of global leadership.
“It is time to put people before corporations and rights before profits,” Salil Shetty, Amnesty International secretary-general, says. The annual report, released on Wednesday, focuses on the failure of leadership the world over in face of the courage shown by protesters.
“On the economic side, India is being taken very seriously. It’s a major player, now not like before. This power, however, has not translated to leadership in the political and foreign policy domain,” Mr Shetty tells this newspaper, talking about India’s role in the new emerging world situation.
“If you see the voting patterns or positioning on human rights issues – there is still a 1960s and 1970s thinking, a Cold War thinking (in India). Generally speaking, if the West votes one way, we’ll vote the other. It’s not a bad starting point, but things are changing dramatically,” he says.
“They need to feel strong enough to say, ‘No we won’t toe the line. It doesn’t matter where the United States and the European Union vote, it doesn’t matter where Russia and China vote. We, India, Brazil, and South Africa are democratic countries. We have grown up with human rights as part of our framework and we are not going to accept this.’ However, we are not there yet,” he concludes.
In strong criticism of the UN Security Council’s lack of leadership, Mr Shetty says: “The Security Council, which is meant to be preserving international peace and security is doing anything but that. So Egypt is completely supported by the Americans for a long period of time because of the Israel question, the French are protecting Tunisia, and the Russians are protecting Syria. The Russians want to sell arms to Syria so they will block the Security Council vote. We need to stop behaving in that way.”
He is hopeful of India’s emerging leadership on issues of concern like Syria and Sri Lanka. “There are some hopeful signs but there is a long way to go,” he says, adding, “So really if you are in the Security Council, and India and Brazil want to get in, we need to show different ways of behaving. Sri Lanka is a classic case. Finally, we voted on the human rights council in favour of the resolution which is good and we did vote for the Syria resolution, but that has only happened in the last few months.”
The Amnesty’s 50th global human rights report also called for a strong global Arms Trade Treaty later this year.
Economic progress in India has been uneven and has not benefited people in a fair manner. “It will be quite hard to deny the fact that there has been economic progress in the country and that has trickled down to some extent. However, there is no debate about the fact that a significant proportion of the benefits have gone to a relatively small group of the population. From the human rights point of view, the issue is really whether the social, economic and cultural rights of the people being met or not, and we have a long way to go on that.”
“If you take of these – right to health, right to education, right to sanitation, right to adequate housing, we are miles away from reaching the target,” he says.
“People who don’t have a voice are the ones who are poor and the ones who are poor don’t have a voice,” he says on the issue of civil political rights and economic social cultural rights, which he says are connected intrinsically in India.
Commenting on the Indian government’s bid to censor content on the Internet, Mr Shetty says he is very surprised with the reaction of the government.
“Leave alone from the human rights point of view, from the right to information point to view or freedom of expression point of view, it is really a violation of a lot of that. But even from a pragmatic point of view I don’t see them being able to do any of that anyway. I am not sure what the point of it is anyway because all they got is that they got everybody’s hackles up,” he says, adding that from Amnesty point of view, the idea of banning Internet content or creating cyber laws to control social media is simply not acceptable.
He is optimistic about the progress of rights movements in India. “I am optimistic because the people of India will not allow the things to continue as they have. As people get more exposed to these issues they will not accept this reality. My optimism comes from people more than, so far, the response from the government,” he says.
“I would say the most inspiring thing about India is that despite all the human rights violation we see - this is not a new thing but which we saw last year – is people standing up. Even people who didn’t think about these issues before stood up for the first time and raised their voice.”
Amnesty is now reviving its India office, having appointed former Greenpeace director Ananthapadmanabhan Guruswamy as the first director of Amnesty India. The organisation aims to attract 100,000 members in India in the next five years in order to become self-sufficient financially.
“There are enough Indians concerned with global issues and human rights who would want to become part of Amnesty and we need to make that information available to them. Things have gone a bit quiet in the last few years and we want to revive it,” Mr Shetty says,
The main Amnesty office will be in Bengaluru, but it will also have an advocacy centre in Delhi. “There is no shortage of issues. We have been working on adivasis and security issues and Kashmir. What we will do which we wouldn’t have done if we were not on the ground is the whole human rights education – work in campuses and school,” he says.
“Amnesty has worked on diverse issues in India from the Binayak Sen issue in Chhattisgarh to the issue of prisoners of conscience in Jammu and Kashmir. We are just trying figure out which are the campaigns we must start our work with again in India. We don’t have a firm plan as yet,” he says, but mentions the issue of forced evictions, both in urban context as well as rural.
“Land grabbing is happening in both rural and urban context as the pressures are growing. In rural areas it is linked to natural resources, in urban areas it’s housing projects, big development projects.
I must say it is not restricted only to India. In Brazil, for example, with the Fifa World Cup and the Olympics coming up in Rio we are seeing these issues there as well. In big growing economies, these are the challenges that come up. Nobody is saying you shouldn’t acquire land; it’s a question of how you do it, following due process.