- Originally published in State Department February 28, 2005
Copyright 2005 Federal Information and News Dispatch, Inc.
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.)