Foreign policy and Human Rights

(2) Promoting joint advocacy and mobilization among human rights defenders from Africa, Asia and Latin America foreign policy and Human Rights - in certain cases, the mobilization of the local national or regional civil society is not enough to influence the change in a situation of human rights violation. There are many explanations for this impossibility - there can be a restriction upon liberty in that specific society or a heavy environment of oppression from the local authorities. In these cases, the involvement of organizations from other regions of the world is fundamental in order to support the local civil society and also raise the awareness of their own government about the situation. The coordinated action between human rights organizations of the Global South are a novelty and, as they are also located in developing countries, it weakens the traditional argument of oppressive governments which claim that northern NGOs or countries are not legitimated to develop this kind of actions.

In June of 2007, a concrete example of the mobilization of advocacy was put forth as civil society organizations from Latin American countries mobilized to solve a situation on the African continent. In this occasion, Conectas sponsored a mission composed by zimbabwean human rights defenders to travel to Latin America in order for them to expose to NGOs in the region the fragile human rights situation in their country. This experience demonstrated the importance and the urgent need for coordinated action between organizations of the Global South, as the society in Zimbabwe did not offer these human rights defenders the opportunity for voicing their opinion due to the repressive posture of their government. Together with their Latin American counterparts, the Zimbabwe human rights defenders have created concrete plans of actions such as helping to raise the awareness of the leaders of the visited Latin American Countries about the difficult human rights situation in the country. The Latin American and Zimbabwean human rights defenders also elaborated actions that would influence the transparency of the Zimbabwean presidential elections this coming March of 2008. The various actions proposed includes sending election observers from countries and maybe even OAS election observers to monitor the ways the elections are run.

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(1) strengthening southern NGOs’ participation at the UN Human Rights System;

(3) fostering the creation, at the national level, of formal mechanisms for civil society participation in foreign policy formulation.