International Human Rights Day

Published 7th December 2006, 5:57pm

International Human Rights Day falls on the 10th December, in commemoration of the day in 1948 when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This year, the Cayman Islands Human Rights Committee (HRC) would like recognise International Human Rights Day by delivering two important messages.

Firstly, the HRC would like to join with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) in identifying poverty as a major factor in the limitation of human rights across the globe. As Louise Arbour; the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights; notes:

“Today poverty prevails as the gravest human rights challenge in the world. Combating poverty, deprivation and exclusion is not a matter of charity, and it does not depend on how rich a country is. By tackling poverty as a matter of human rights obligation, the world will have a better chance of abolishing this scourge in our lifetime.”

In order to encourage decision-makers to view poverty through the lens of human rights, the UNHCR has developed a series of Fact Sheets, which the HRC is posting on its website for International Human Rights Day. To visit these, please go to www.humanrights.gov.ky.

The HRC would also like to encourage those persons engaged in the local National Assessment of Living Conditions and the Participatory Poverty Assessment; to which the HRC has been invited to contribute; to recognise that many of the ingredients that go into making poverty – such as, discrimination, unequal access to resources and cultural stigmatization – are denials of human rights and human dignity by another name.

Secondly, the HRC intends to use the 2006 International Human Rights Day as an opportunity to advance the need for the inclusion of human rights in the Constitution of the Cayman Islands. This has been talked about for quite some time now; it has featured in the reports of the last two sets of Constitutional Commissioners; and it also formed part of the last draft Constitution that was presented to the Cayman Islands for consideration. Now that the Cayman Islands has accepted the right of individual petition to the European Court of Human Rights, the need for a domestic legal remedy for human rights has become all the more evident. As one of its primary goals, the HRC is proposing that this forthcoming year, up until the 2007 International Human Rights Day, should be devoted to the final realisation of human rights in the constitutional arrangements of the Cayman Islands. Accordingly, the HRC will revisit this topic on a regular basis in an effort to make tangible progress towards this goal by the 10th December 2007.

If you would like to contact the HRC, please address written correspondence to PO Box 30664, Grand Cayman KY1 1203 or alternatively, emails can be sent to humanrights@gov.ky.

For further information contact: Human Rights Committee