Strasbourg, 24/04/2015 (Agence Europe) - “2014 was a bad year for human rights.” This is the short, devastating sentence that opens the annual human rights report in the 47 countries of the Council of Europe (CoE) presented by Nils Muiznieks (Latvia), chair of the CoE human rights committee to the Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) on Thursday 23 April.
“Last year thousands of people died who should not have died, primarily in the Mediterranean Sea and in eastern Ukraine”, Muiznieks said. This should not have happened on the doorstep of Europe that prides itself on being “a space where the rule of law and democracy prevails, on a continent that claims to have drawn lessons from its own bloody and violent history”.
Criticising the European Union, he regretted the ending of the Mare Nostrum operation that ran from October 2014 to October 2015. This Italian-led operation, Muiznieks said, had shown that, with political will and proper funding, “tens of thousands of lives could be saved”. Unfortunately, the operation had to be abandoned by Italy, which could no longer bear the cost alone and which received scant support from other European countries. The Triton operation has picked up the baton but it is ill-adapted to the task in terms of scope and resources and does not have saving lives as its prime objective. “In the first few months of 2015, 1,600 migrants drowned”, he pointed out. “These deaths could have been avoided.”
The 79-page report also highlights the situation in Ukraine in 2014 where “a serious humanitarian crisis is hitting the most vulnerable” and expresses concern at the serious deterioration in the human rights situation in Azerbaijan where, from last summer, the authorities have prosecuted and detained many of the country's foremost human rights activists on grounds which “defied credibility”.
The pressure on NGOs and the media increased in several CoE member states, Muiznieks said. Such a situation requires that strong measures be taken “lest we wake up one day with no reporters or NGOs exposing corruption, abuses of power and human rights violations”. (Véronique Leblanc)