BuaNews (Tshwane)
Shaun Benton
18 April 2008
Cape Town — Rights of an elected parliamentarian must be respected as it impacts on the entire country, according to the Committee on Human Rights of the Interparliamentary Union (IPU).
"... if the rights of an elected parliamentarian are not respected, this does not bode well for the ordinary citizens of those countries," says President of the IPU Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians, Sharon Carstairs, Thursday.
The IPU, which is currently holding its 118th assembly in Cape Town, has held 21 hearings on the human rights of parliamentarians during its week-long meeting.
There are currently 35 countries where the the IPU's human rights committee is dealing with cases around the human rights of parliamentarians, she said, involving 290 parliamentarians.
The 21 hearings held so far this week has involved a variety of delegations from these 35 countries, said Ms Carstairs.
The IPU committee is to "go public" with a number of cases on its last day, Friday, while a number of "confidential cases" will remain so for as long as the IPU committee sees "progress being made" in the country concerned.
"We are not here with a purpose of embarrassing parliaments, we are here with the purpose of solving problems, and if we can solve those problems behind closed doors then we do our best to do that," she said.
"However, there are cases in which we tried very hard to solve them behind closed doors but [have] not been successful, and they become public cases," she added.
Among these public cases include an MP from Pakistan, which has successfully been resolved, she said, with this MP now once again serving as a parliamentarian, after spending a number of years in solitary confinement.
In another case, the assassination of an MP in 1988 was investigated by the IPU committee until as late as this year, said Ms Carstairs because only this year was his assassin convicted of murder, and is now serving 20 years in prison.
In other "less than positive news", she said, 11 parliamentarians in Eritrea have been detained there since 18 September 2001, detained on various charges.
The African Union Commission on Human Rights in November 2003 cited Eritrea in violation of human and political rights, said Ms Carstairs, and ordered the immediate release and compensation of the 11 parliamentarians.
However, these 11 parliamentarians now remain incommunicado "somewhere in Eritrea, in prison, incommunicado, no contact whatsoever - and that was five years ago", she said.
In another case, in Palestine, she said, there are over 14 parliamentarians who are members of the Palestinian Legislative Council who ran in the last election, and "who are now held in Israeli prisons".
"These individuals were elected in a democratic process, that everybody recognised as a democratic process, including Israel," she said.
Another case involves a woman member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, who has been held in "administrative detention" for three months, which has been extended for another three months, she said.
No charges have been laid, no trial has been held in the majority of these cases, she said.
"We are deeply concerned that the rule of law has not been respected with respect to these parliamentarians," she said.
The IPU Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians has been meeting four times a year since the 1970s, "when the world was becoming more concerned about human rights", said Ms Carstairs, who is a Canadian MP.
Other members of the IPU Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians include representatives of the parliaments of Belgium, Mexico, Algeria, Philippines.
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