Stephen Harper government should change tack and embrace UN rapporteurs

Last year, the Canadian government made headlines when it demonized Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, for criticizing the state of food insecurity across the country.

De Schutter’s mission was standard fare at the UN; every member state submits to investigations like his on a regular basis. And for a long time, Ottawa was remarkably tolerant of such initiatives, and of their conclusions, even when it knew that, far too often, its harshest critics came from countries that treated their own citizens significantly worse.

This traditional Canadian approach, faithfully adhered to by Liberals and Progressive Conservatives alike, was grounded in a clear understanding of the national interest.

Unlike the situation in Canada, where a healthy dialogue with civil society can make the findings of UN rapporteurs redundant, most states around the world are significantly less tolerant of internal dissent. It is therefore often left to outside organizations to exert the necessary political pressure to effect change.

Traditionally, Ottawa contributed to their efforts by lending them international legitimacy.

And while it might have been distasteful (and ironic), successive Canadian governments recognized that allowing some of the world’s most egregious human rights violators to participate in UN investigations could do just that.

In other words, if the government of Iran were permitted to examine Canada’s human rights record, it became more challenging politically for Tehran to brush off Canadian resolutions in the UN General Assembly condemning its own policies.

The key for Ottawa, then, was to bite its tongue in the face of some of the more outrageous UN commentaries, and to respond constructively to the more helpful ones.

Last year’s attacks on De Schutter, not to mention the comments of an unnamed official on a more recent review in Geneva, which suggested that Canada took UN criticism “with a grain of salt,” suggest a new message from Ottawa – an arrogant declaration that only some states deserve to have their records scrutinized, and that Canada is not one of them.

Beginning this summer, the United Nations plans to send the first of at least three special rapporteurs to Canada to evaluate the federal government’s performance on a number of human rights issues. One can only hope that, this time, Ottawa can absorb whatever criticism is inevitably brought forward with greater tact.

Providing these UN agents with credibility should be Canada’s way of adding force to condemnations of other states whose records are genuinely abhorrent.

Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Adam Chapnick