ROLE NGO for HUMAN RIGHT

Non-governmental organisations first appeared Around the 19th century when fight for refusal of slavery trade in england. but after the Second World War, and with the creation of the United Nations, the need and place for a consultative role for organisations that were neither governments nor member states was recognised. The acceptance of these bodies led to the term Non-governmental organisations. originally defined these bodies as any international body that is not founded by an international treaty.1 however the United Nations now describe a Non-Governmental Organisation as a non for profit, voluntary citizens group, which is organised on a local, national, or international level to address issues in support of the public good. NGOs have, since the end of the Second World War, become increasingly more important to global development. They often hold an interesting role in a nations political, economic or social activities, as well as assessing and addressing problems in both national and international issues, such as human, political and womens rights, economic development, democratisation, inoculation and immunisation, health care, or the environment. While NGOs were instrumental in achieving the inclusion of human rights standards in the United Nations Charter in 1945, they were few in number and influence at that time. Only forty-one NGOs held consultative status with ECOSOC in 1948 and fewer yet focused exclusively on human rights issues. Since the 1960s, however, the number of NGOs and their influence both nationally and internationally has grown exponentially. Approximately 500 NGOs held consultative status with ECOSOC in 1968; this number had increased to over 1000 by 1992. As the World Bank has noted, total development aid disbursed by international NGOs increased ten-fold between 1970 and 1985. The World Bank estimates that the number of national NGOs in developing countries is between 6,000 and 30,000.2 Human rights are the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are considered entitled: the right to life, liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equal treatment before the law, among others. Such rights are ascribed "naturally," which means that they are not earned and cannot be denied on the basis of race, creed, ethnicity or gender.3 These rights are often advanced as legal rights and protected by the rule of law. However, they are distinct from and prior to law, and can be used as standards for formulating or criticizing both local and international law. It is typically thought that the conduct of governments and military forces must comply with these standards. Nongovernmental organizations have used their consultative status at the UN to affect intractable conflict in many ways. They have organized to get the General Assembly and other UN organs to pass resolutions on disarmament, on development, on human rights, and on other subjects related to the underlying sources of conflicts. They have helped to develop
1 2 3

. UN/ECOSOC. "Work of the Non-Governmental Organizations Section of the Secretariat, Report of the Secretary-General." 8 May 1998 Source From Ecosoc Development of NGO

. Little, David. "Universality of Human Rights," [available at: http://www.usip.org/research/rehr/universality.html] (no longer available as of March 5th 2013)

new UN institutions and treaties. They have been the instigators of putting new issues on the UN agenda, issues like environment, women's rights, and child soldiers. They have gotten UN bodies to put questions of armament and disarmament before the World Court, and have been important in the development of the International Criminal Court. They have delivered humanitarian assistance and aided refugees, and have worked on development in societies that have recently experienced violent conflict. Human rights organisations recognise the real difficulties that governments have in steering their way through such geopolitical chaos and it may seem naive to insist at every turn on an adherence to human rights. The argument so favoured by the Lee Kwan Yu school of thought, namely that human rights are all very well but can only come after a degree of economic stability has been achieved, superficially at least, has a kind of logic: let us calm our chaos and consumers with wealth and then think about justice; more specifically let us intensify our economic relations even with those countries which have an extremely poor human rights record in the hope that this will bring about a greater tolerance. Human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are often among the first to reach the scene of massive violations of human rights and humanitarian law. Traditionally, human rights NGOs documented violations, drew attention to them, and by doing so, helped to bring a halt to ongoing violations. But human rights NGOs are having to rethink their practices in light of the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the prospect that the violations they are documenting could become the subject of a criminal prosecution before an international tribunal. Frequently, local and international human rights NGOs will also arrive quickly with the aim of establishing what happened and documenting the violations. Some NGOs will be on the ground already, doing other work. Others will come in specifically to investigate and document the atrocities. Human rights NGOs are likely to broadly share the goals of the ICC to combat impunity for gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. The human rights movement that has grown up in recent decades in almost every country of the world has developed methodologies and practices for monitoring and documenting human rights violations. Often they work in difficult and dangerous circumstances in order to collect and disseminate information with the aim of putting an end to abuses by focusing the worlds attention on them. Commonly they call for accountability of perpetrators as one way of addressing the violations. In any given situation that comes before the ICC, there may be NGOs that have set out to document NGOs may have been able to document violations soon after their occurrence, perhaps before people scatter or evidence is lost. Indeed, NGOs are one of the main sources that draw the attention of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) to situations where crimes under the Rome Statute may have been committed in the first place.3Already, NGOs around the world are asking how they file information with the ICC, and the ICC has received 2 hundreds of communications from these and other civil society actors.
4

According to Article 15 of the Rome Statute and Rule 104 of the ICC Rules of Procedure and Evidence, the Prosecutor may receive and seek information from reliable sources he deems appropriate.

NGO assistance may be all the more important in the absence of State cooperation. Although States Parties to the Rome Statute are under an obligation to cooperate with the Prosecutor, and all States have a general duty under international law to cooperate in combating impunity for crimes of international concern such as those under the ICCs jurisdiction, the reality is that there are a host of factors that may prevent such cooperation, including the fact that the State itself may not control the territory in question. A key area of NGO activity has been in the field of standard-setting. While some standard-setting exercises are initiated by NGOs, others are initiated by governments. For example, the proposal to draft a Convention on the Rights of the Child came from Poland in 1979.5 Regardless of the source of the drafting idea, NGOs have joined actively in the drafting process. The first of these led to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.6 The various `hard-law' and `soft law texts on torture owe much to the sustained contribution of a number of specialised NGOs.7 Few instances of NGO attempts to secure a satisfactory text are as sophisticated and coordinated as that described by Cynthia Price Cohen, in this volume, in relation to the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child The roles of NGOs in intractable conflict are multiple, from direct conflict resolution, Track Two diplomacy, and mediation in crisis and long-term conflict areas, to assistance in monitoring elections, to delivery of humanitarian assistance and development aid, to advocacy of human rights and justice, to lobbying governments to develop the longterm conditions which promote international peace and security. Their roles are often, but not always, positive, but they are not usually the primary players in any of these arenas. But without these NGOs, many of the accomplishments of states and international organizations would not have been possible.

5 6

the chapter by Cynthia Price Cohen D. Weissbrodt, `The Role of Nongovernmental Organizations in the Implementation of Human Rights', 7 Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists and the International Association of Penal Law. See Rodley, op.cit