On the eve of “Human Rights Day”, celebrated on 10 December, the Secretary General and the current Icelandic Presidency of the Council of Europe issued a joint statement focussing on the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in Ukraine.
On 9 December, the Commissioner for Human Rights published a highly critical report on the UK’s human rights record.
In their joint statement, Marija Pejčinović Burić and Þórdís Kolbrún Reykfjörð Gylfadóttir, Iceland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, call for “a collective response to grave violations of human rights and crimes committed in the context of Russia’s persisting aggression against Ukraine”.
In the face of these violations, “among the most appalling since the Second World War”, they call for “common and decisive” action by the international community to ensure that the perpetrators of all crimes committed in Ukraine in the context of the war “are held to account”.
They also state that the Council of Europe’s contribution to establishing responsibility for these serious human rights violations will be on the agenda of the 4th Summit of Heads of State and Government, which is to be held in Reykjavik on 16 and 17 May 2023.
In her report on the UK, the Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, reveals “the anxiety fed by what appears to be an increasingly antagonistic attitude towards human rights by the UK government, and especially by recent and proposed changes to laws and policies”.
The main issue is the proposal to repeal the “Human Rights Act” and replace it with a human rights charter.
Called the “Bill of Rights”, it would encourage divergent interpretations of these rights by national courts and the European Court of Human Rights.
Threats to the right to peaceful assembly, violations of the rights of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, and toxic public discourse about transgender people are also denounced in a report that also insists on children’s rights and calls for the withdrawal of the proposed Northern Ireland Trouble Bills, known as the “Legacy Bill”.
Intended to close off any possibility of investigating human rights abuses in the context of the civil war between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Unionists that ended in 1998, the Act is “widely opposed in Northern Ireland” and raises “serious issues of compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights”, the Commissioner warns.
Link to the Commissioner’s report: https://aeur.eu/f/4lj (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)