DEFENDING THE DEFENDERS
DEFENDING THE DEFENDERS:
Working Together to Find Global Solutions
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INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS DAY
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FORDHAM UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL
Saturday, December 9, 2000 - 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Outline of Proceedings
Fordham University Law Dean, John Feerick, welcomed the participants and congratulated the Rosemary Nelson Campaign for organizing the conference. Professor Martin Flaherty, of Fordham's Crowley Program in Human Rights, stressed the importance of protecting human rights defenders. He also thanked Senior Crowley Fellow JeanMarie Fenrich for her hard work in support of the conference.
Richard Harvey, U.S. spokesperson for the Rosemary Nelson Program, described the developments behind International Human Rights Defenders Day and the United Nations Defenders Declaration of 1998. A year ago, on the first U.N. Human Rights Defenders Day, we organized the Fordham Forum on Defending Defenders. We drew lessons from the Northern Ireland experience of threats to human rights defenders, especially Rosemary Nelson (I 959-1999) and Patrick Finucane (I 948-1989). Both these courageous human rights lawyers were targeted and killed due to their defense of the human rights of their clients.
Since then, the U.N. Secretary General, responding to the longstanding concern of the international human rights community, had delighted the NGO community by appointing the outstanding Pakistani lawyer, Ms. Hina Jilani, as his Special Representative on Human Rights Defenders. We also welcome other recent positive developments in protecting HRDS, such as the Jacob Blaustein Center's consultative meeting with Ms. Jilani in September; the Bar Association of England and Wales meeting on HRD's at which Ms. Jilani spoke in October; and the Amnesty International World Lawyers Conference in Belfast in October. We took particular note of the important role played by LTN Special Rapporteurs in promoting these developments, particularly Dato Param Cumaraswamy, the Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, who himself is threatened and penalized by his home government of Malaysia.
Recognizing that threats to human rights workers in many fields are global in their impact, we had broadened both our geographic and our thematic points of focus for Defenders Day 2000. HRD's may be lone individuals or small monitoring groups. They may be whole communities, for example, the people of Derry in the north of Ireland in 1972, when 14 of them were shot dead on the streets by the British Army because they dared to demonstrate peacefully against apartheid-style internment without charge or trial, suspension of habeas corpus and the torture of internees. HRD's may even be an entire people, such as the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australasia and other parts of the world, who protest collectively against genocidal and repressive policies of those who would subject or exterminate them.