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Commonwealth divided over its handling of Gambia, other unruly members
Sunday, 10 October 2010 02:18
By Kemo ChamThe effectiveness of the Commonwealth has come under the spotlight after a leaked memo revealed internal squabble over its handling of unruly member states, including Gambia.
The document, obtained by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, revealed that the organization’s Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma has been at loggerheads with his staff over the role of the commonwealth in dealing with uncooperative member countries who shuns its human rights commitment.
SG Sharma said it was not their job to speak out against abuses by its member states.
The organization, founded in 1949, was initially a group of countries that made part of the British Empire. Recently, however, membership has transcended former British colonies. But inclusion into the club whose membership now stands at 54 nations has always been based within a framework of common values and goals as outlined in the Singapore Declaration. These include the promotion of democracy, human rights, good governance, the rule of law, and individual liberty.
This latest revelation, however, suggests that the Commonwealth has abandoned its key fundamental value of human rights.
The organization’s London-based institutions, the secretariat and the charitable foundation, are both in turmoil, driven by disputes over their purpose and direction, and internal wrangles over the treatment of staff, writes the Guardian, which said all this is likely to intensify questions over what the Commonwealth is for.
The most threatening internal rupture is reported to be over human rights, as staff at the secretariat were said to be furious by the secretary general’s silence over a series of abuses by member states in recent years, including President Yahya Jammeh’s outrageous outburst against homosexuals in 2008. Widespread atrocities committed by government troops and the Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka, at the end of that country’s civil war last year, as well as the sentencing the same year of a Malawi gay couple for being homosexuals are also at the fore front of this debacle.
The document showed that the Commonwealth Secretary General ignored calls from secretariat staff urging him to at least express concern over these issues.
"The secretariat … has no explicitly defined mandate to speak publicly on human rights," Sharma's office, according to the document, told senior staff. "The expectation is that the secretary general will exercise his good offices as appropriate for the complaint and not that he will pronounce on them."
"All those cases were all about the values the Commonwealth is supposed to stand for and we failed. I feel we could become moribund," the UK Guardian quoted a disgruntled staff member.
Human rights activists have condemned the comments by the office of the Secretary General as representing a reversal of the Commonwealth's tradition of speaking out over gross abuses, such as apartheid, the Guardian writes. They said the secretary general was contradicting a key policy document adopted by Commonwealth heads of state in 1995 that calls for the "immediate public expression by the secretary general of the Commonwealth's collective disapproval of any such infringement" of democratic values and fundamental human rights.
Towards the end of last year, in the run up to its biennial CHOGM, the Commonwealth came under intense pressure by human rights organizations who called for the banning of President Jammeh from attending the Trinidad and Tobago meeting. Jammeh ended bowing to pressure and sent ministers to represent him.
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Comments
You can say that again. This is the same reason why similar institutions with political influence have become irrelevant. The governments make the selection, what do you expect of the puppet they always select? especially if these puppets are from the developing world. Look at the AU, ECOWAS, and all other such institutions governed by despots...the same characteristics .
The promotion of democracy, human rights, justice, good governance, the rule of law, and individual liberty is somehow not embedded in their "culture" or country of origin. Since these are more lacking in India and its Subcontinent and never being address in Kamalesh Sharma Indian diplomatic career.
I guessed his MASALA diplomacy continues while Burma, Srilanka or Gambia bleeds. Since he is elected by the heads of commonwealth states whom the majority are have corrupt or undemocratic rulers,
I am not surprised he and many coming from such cultures will turn the commonwealth to a MAHARAJA CLUB of world CASTs. Where one can pay money/endorsement to buy commonwealth silence and support.
They should change the requirement for the secretarygenera l post to bring in democrats and human rights defenders.
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