To mark International Human Rights Day, the Green Party's spokesman on human rights, Peter Tatchell, has reiterated our party's call for a Global Human Rights Index as a way to pressure international governments to clean up their record.
Tatchell commented: "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), agreed by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, is one of the most important documents in human history. The UDHR embodies a global humanitarian consenus, but its big problem is adherence and enforcement. Grave human rights abuses - such as religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, censorship, rigged elections and trade union suppression - are widespread in many countries. Britain itself has house arrest without charge, libel laws that inhibit free speech and restrictions on the right to peaceful protest near parliament."
"We have no objective, transparent measure to determine a country's conformity to, or departure from, human rights norms. We have no independent yardstick to assess which countries are the worst human rights abusers and which ones have the best human rights records."
"The power of publicity and moral leverage should not be under-estimated. Even tyrannies are conscious of their image."
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You can read the full comment piece from Peter here.
You can read the Green Party's report, proposing the Global Human Rights Index, here:
www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/reports/ReportHRI_-4-2.pdf