New Office To Guard Rights of Afro-Latinos in the Americas
/- Originally published in State Department February 28, 2005
By Eric Green, Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- A new office created within the Organization of American States (OAS) is charged with protecting the human rights of 150 million people of African descent in the mostly Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.
In a February 25 statement, the OAS said the head of the new office will guard against discrimination against the region's largest ethnic minority, who comprise close to 30 percent of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The OAS said the new position, formally called the "Special Rapporteurship on the Rights of Persons of African Descent and on Racial Discrimination," will focus on such issues as generating "awareness" by the OAS member states of their "duty to respect the human rights of Afro-descendants" and on the need to eliminate "all forms of racial discrimination" against this group.
The new office also will prepare reports and special studies, and analyze complaints of racial discrimination against Afro-descendants. In addition, the office will make recommendations to an OAS body, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), on setting up hearings about alleged violations of the rights of Afro-Latinos.
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) says people of African descent total 40 percent of the poor in the Americas. In Brazil and Colombia, the countries with the largest black populations in South America, Afro-Latinos are among the poorest, least educated and lowest-paid citizens. In Brazil, 52 percent of Afro-Latinos live in houses with no adequate sanitation; in Colombia, 80 percent of the black population lives in conditions of extreme poverty, said the IDB.
The IDB is hosting a February 28 seminar that focuses on a recent report, "Afro-Latinos in Latin America and Considerations for U.S. Policy," by Clare Ribando, a Latin America analyst with the U.S. Congressional Research Service. Ribando will be one of the participants at the event, along with David Johnston, the Colombia desk officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In a separate development, IACHR opened its 122nd regular session February 24 by highlighting what it called "important advances" in human rights in the Americas. These advances include Mexico's launch of a comprehensive, national human-rights program; approval of constitutional reforms in Brazil; and efforts by Argentina, Chile and Paraguay to investigate and punish those responsible for serious human-rights violations.
The IACHR's new chair, Clare Roberts of Antigua and Barbuda, inaugurated the session by calling on OAS member states to fully assume their role as "collective guarantors of the hemispheric human-rights promotion and protection system."
Roberts said the region is faced with many pending human-rights challenges, such as impunity regarding human-rights violations, arbitrary detention, attacks in some countries on the independence and impartiality of the judiciary, and inhuman conditions of detention in prisons.
The new chair said the fact that at least 221 million people, representing 44 percent of the region's population, live in poverty constitutes "obstacles that impede" their "effective enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights," and also has a negative effect on many civil and political rights.
The IACHR is one of two bodies in the OAS system charged with promoting and protecting human rights. The system's other human rights body is the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, located in San Jose, Costa Rica.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State.)
