| Second
Open-Ended Working Group to Consider Options Regarding the Elaboration
of an Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights
Geneva, Switzerland
10-21 January 2005
Statement by
IWRAW Asia Pacific made on 12 January 2005
Referring to presentations by experts of various regional Human
Rights Systems
Thank you Madam
Chair.
My name is Tulika
Srivastava and I speak on behalf of IWRAW Asia Pacific, an organisation
that works extensively in the Asia-Pacific region.
I have been
listening with immense respect to the critical headway made by the
regional mechanisms in Africa and in the European Union, to protect
and promote the economic, social and cultural rights by ensuring
protection to individual victims of the violations of the same.
I will take
this opportunity to provide a perspective of an Asian national NGO
to whom such forums are not available, to the gains that would be
accelerated by the elaboration and adoption of an Optional Protocol
to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The international
mechanisms, Madam Chair, for those of us based in local communities,
are instruments to ensure local implementation of human rights,
guaranteed by the treaty-bodies and articulated in our laws.
The very existence
of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW without, I might point out, opening
the floodgates for complaints, has precipitated a vigorous engagement
with exercising human rights on part of the right holders –
individuals and groups – and with protection mechanisms on
part of the duty bearers, the state actors.
This has enabled
both the judiciary and the administration to have a much greater
knowledge about the violations being faced by the marginalised groups
as well as about the process of ensuring redress and access to justice.
It is with the same hope that we ask for an OP to the ICESCR.
The Optional
Protocol will also lend itself to direct use by providing an opportunity
for a constructive dialogue between the victims and the state, enabling
a sustainable resolution. This is especially important, as we must
not forget that adjudicative remedies available in the domestic
arena are mostly adversarial in nature, so defined by most legal
traditions. Often the winning and losing of a case as less to do
with its merits, and much more to do with the manner in which it
was legally handled, or even delayed, to the extent of even denial
of justice.
I would also
like to specify why IWRAW Asia Pacific and myself, a national organisation,
are here to work for an OP which is holistic and applies to all
the rights and to all levels of obligations that accrue to the state:
to respect, protect and fulfill.
Our primary
concern is, as always, the local realisation of economic, social
and cultural rights through domestic implementation. A division
between rights and levels of obligation will contribute to a diminished
understanding of rights and obligations at the national level. It
will make for a confused message that the states do not have to
be consistent in their endeavor to ensure all the rights for their
citizens, that they do not really have to be serious about certain
right or even certain levels of obligations.
In order to
enable a holistic realisation of rights at the domestic level, it
is critical that the present Optional Protocol addresses all the
rights and all levels of state obligations.
Thank you Madam
Chair.
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