THE ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST DISAPPEARANCES



Solidarity message from Ms. Martha Meijer of The Netherlands Humanist Committee of Linking Solidarity, read by Atty. James de la Vega during the Asian and Latin American Lawyers’ Meeting on Involuntary Disappearances, sponsored by the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) on November 27, 2000 at Jakarta, Indonesia

 

Dear participants of this AFAD Lawyers’ Meeting:

 

Linking arms: Linking Solidarity facilitates exchange of experiences among victims from four continents.

I felt very honored and inspired by the invitation I received to attend and address this meeting. Still, I have to be absent because my other commitments did not allow me to travel to Jakarta. You cannot imagine hoe much I regret not to be with you, but we have some problems in our own organization as to funding and project proposals that have to be immediately addressed. Our project officer, Ms. Henriette Emaar, whom many of you have met in Manila, is unable to attend either. Please be convinced of our commitment to the struggle against disappearances and that is why I am sending you some of my thoughts on the role of civil society, and I hope that my contribution for the discussion will be useful in the development of strategies in your meeting.



Let me start by some common ground as to what we are discussing. Civil society in my opinion is a mixture of private groups with certain characteristics:



So in general, civil society groups can be active in the fields of consumer interests, environmental interests or human rights interests; but they may also be pursuing more individual aims like special healthcare, education, arts, etc. It can be argued that labor unions, political parties and other politically motivated groups also belong to civil society, but I would not agree to that in all cases. I think that the non-governmental nature of civil society groups is very important, and that political parties and labor unions are on the verge of becoming governmental, or at least participants in governmental negotiations.



A government is ideally being controlled by parliament in its policy-making, and by the judiciary in its violations of rights and justice. Government and a parliament can also be influenced by public opinion, led by opinion-leaders or important media establishments. How do these relate to civil society groups?



With regard to the cause they stand for, non-governmental organizations have the ability and the ambition


I stress here the role of non-governmental action as a counterbalance to governmental violations. I know that many violations are perpetrated by others but condoned by the authorities. Still in these kind of cases, government is the addressee of the action, because it has the obligation by national and international law to protect its population against injustice and violations of human rights. But often, non-governmental action has to use the channels of legal, political and public debate to realize the counterbalance.



There is another addressee in this respect and that is the international community, the United Nations and Regional Human Rights Mechanisms. The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has limited power and the drafting of the UN Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance is important. Often, governments are not the appropriate bodies to realize a Convention that has real power to withstand and correct (sometimes the same) governments. The UN is able to act as a control mechanism, but those to be controlled are also those who set the rules. That is why we also need non-governmental action.



Regional Human Rights Mechanisms are often a possibility for concrete and individual complaints, and our friends from Latin America know from their experience how important that can be. The more disappointing case is that in Asia, such a Mechanism does not yet exist, and again this is an issue for non-governmental action.



In order to do this in an effective way, civil society groups use their existing expertise and develop their knowledge in their field. There are different ways to extend expertise and this is an issue I want to explore further, as in my opinion, it is different fro groups that fight involuntary disappearances than for other groups.



In the experience of our special project Linking Solidarity that facilitates contacts and exchange of information among associations of relatives of disappeared persons, the associations of relatives are of a very special kind. Many human rights groups have gathered their expertise from formal or informal education. Organizations like LBH in Indonesia, or Asian groups like the Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism consists mainly of lawyers and legal experts on human rights and international law. This expertise is necessary to tackle legal issues.



But associations of relatives of disappeared persons have a special “expertise” which lawyers generally lack, and which is necessary to continue fighting, even if results are not feasible. This expertise could be called knowledge based on personal, emotional experience. Someone who really has experienced what it means if you are a relative of someone who has disappeared, knows why to continue the fight is necessary, and makes that knowledge operational. The experience of emotions is in the case of disappearances a very important contribution to understanding the real nature of disappearances.



I remember the first meeting that Linking Solidarity organized in Amsterdam in 1996, when the head of the Department on Unite Nations Affairs of the Dutch Foreign Office made a statement and said to the participants, representatives of associations of relatives from all over the world: “I stand in awe for you,” meaning that awe is respect and admiration, but also a kind of fear or apprehension of the power that the associations of relatives represent because of their motivation and perseverance. And this official, Mr. Toine van Dongen, knew what he was talking about, as he ahs worked for 10 years for the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance.



This meeting in 1996 was good in the exchange of information, but it was even better in the exchange of emotions that only relatives themselves can share and recognize in each other. Using the emotional value of experiences as a weapon in the struggle against disappearances is, in my opinion, a positive way to fight the indignity and the pain of a disappearance. Only the relatives of disappeared persons know how the violation keeps the relatives in a kind of blackmail situation. Only they know how paralyzing this can be, and how much courage it takes to break the blackmail by organizing themselves into associations. These non-legal weapons are necessary for instance to mobilize public opinion, and via the public influence policy-making to end the abuse of power by the authorities.



We from Linking Solidarity—who have never experienced a disappearance among our loved ones—we stand in awe for the input that the relatives can provide in the struggle against disappearances. It is only them who can give this very special input as a necessary addition or supplement to the work of those who have had formal or informal education in the legal field. That is why Linking Solidarity aims at facilitating the exchange of this contribution to all groups involved who want to participate in the Linking Solidarity Network.



I suggest that you as lawyers and as relatives explore where your common ground is, how you can complement each other’s work with much more result than the sum of the two groups separately. If I look at the methods of civil society groups listed above, we can easily se how they complement each other. But that is for your discussion, which I hope will be lively and fruitful.