The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, held in Vienna on 14 – 25 June, presented a good opportunity to hear and assess the European Community policies on Human Rights and their linkages to issues of Democracy and Development.

Having listened to the views and arguments presented, the writer remains unconvinced that the Community spokesmen had excelled themselves in articulating their policies. They hedged around the issue, they spoke in self-contradictions, and they lacked the sense of earnest commitment to the cause, which we are used to hearing from the Community’s own chief exponent on the subject, Vice-President Manuel Marin of DGVIII (Development).

The President-in-office of the EC Council, H.E.Niels Helveg Petersen, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Denmark, cleanly side-stepped the issue by referring to another address which was to be presented the following day to Plenary – presumably by one of the many lackeys in his entourage. However, from his intervention, one was able to glean inklings of possible components of EC policies on the linkages between Human Rights, Democracy and Development.

The President, for instance, spoke of the victims of human rights abuses needing the Community’s help. He reaffirmed that, in the pursuit of human rights, the Community would not resort to “ultimatums or sanctions but through a constructive and open dialogue with other states.”

So it was with bated breath that the Plenary awaited the EC spokesman to piece together these gems of exactitude into a coherent policy statement. But tried as he might, Commissioner and Vice-President Hans van den Broek fell miserably short of coherence. He did not even look happy at the rostrum.

His reference to political conditionality was even enclosed in inverted commas, which seemed to indicate a lack of confidence and half-hearted commitment to that subject. However, he went on to say that the “political conditionality attached to the Community’s economic assistance programmes for reforming countries is not intended to lead to reprimands or to expressions of disapproval. Rather it is intended as a shared aspiration, which can lead to progress through joint efforts.”

Now, that is genuinely EC mumbo jumbo!

When conditionality is invoked, and there is suspension of much-needed development aid, how can this not lead to a reprimand or to an expression of disapproval when the actual decision to suspend the aid is intended to do just that? Ask the Sudanese!

With all due respect to Vice-President van den Broek, this is a classical example of double Dutch!

Furthermore, how can such suspension be intended as a shared aspiration? When the EC suspends aid, the Community is in fact shifting the full responsibility of development for the country concerned to the population of that country, to be shared by them – rich and poor. The Community has divested itself of its share by suspending aid.

Moreover, when the full weight of development is felt, knowing that one’s country has been ostracized, one’s sense of aspiration can be considerably dulled to the level of utter dejection. Therefore, to speak of “shared aspiration” and “progress through joint efforts”, when the chips are down and a country’s back to the wall, is indeed obtruding in tortuous political rhetoric, which borders on an affront against the dignity and intellect of the people in that country.

But why this convolution and equivocation?

I suspect two reasons. The first is that Vice-President Marin’s DGVIII (Development) and Vice-President van den Broek’s DGI (External Relations) do not see the issue from the same perspective, and certainly not from the same vantage point. Whilst the former is a zealot, the latter is a moderate. The latter, therefore, had to veil his own delivery of a subject that sits totteringly between two DGs, in double-entendre, for the dual purpose of having to sound convincing to himself, and having to be heard to be toeing the official line.

The second was that the Community knew very well that its stance on using Human Rights and Democracy as conditionality for development aid was not popularly shared by many. As a matter of fact, many developing countries at the Vienna Conference, and some developed countries, denounced this policy. But what was also interesting was that many UN development agencies and NGOs, including Amnesty International, were equally unreserved in their condemnation of this same policy.

Whilst the Community opted for a strategy aimed at self-preservation, in the face of possible global adverse reaction, it was indeed a great pity that its pronouncements on a subject that has engaged much collective effort on the part of the ACP/EC interlocutors, have raised more questions than they have answered.