World Conference against Racism 2001
The 2001 World Conference against Racism (WCAR), also known as Durban I, was held at the Durban International Convention Centre in Durban, South Africa, under UN auspices, from 31 August to 8 September 2001.
"Durban Conference" redirects here. For the climate change summit, see 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The conference covered several controversial issues, including redress for transatlantic slavery and the second-class citizenry issue in Palestine-Israel.[1][2][3][4] The language of the final Declaration and Programme of Action produced by the conference was strongly disputed in these areas, both in the preparatory meetings in the months that preceded the conference and during the conference itself.
Two delegations, the United States and Israel, withdrew from the conference over objections to a draft document equating Zionism with racism. The final Declaration and Programme of Action did not contain the text that the U.S. and Israel had objected to, that text having been voted out by delegates in the days after the U.S. and Israel withdrew.
In parallel to the conference, a separately held NGO Forum also produced a Declaration and Programme of its own, that was not an official Conference document, which contained language relating to Israel that the WCAR had voted to exclude from its Declaration, and which was criticized by then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson and many others.
The NGO Forum ended in discord. Mary Robinson lost the support of the United States in her office of High Commissioner, and many of the potential political aftereffects of the conference were annulled by the September 11, 2001 attacks. The attacks took place just three days after the conference ended, entirely eclipsing it in the news, and significantly affecting international relations and politics. The conference was followed by the 2009 Durban II conference in Geneva, which was boycotted by ten Western countries. A commemorative Durban III conference in September 2011 in New York has also drawn significant criticism and was boycotted by 14 Western countries.
Preparations[edit]
The conference was authorized by United Nations General Assembly Resolution #52/111. Prior to the conference various preparatory meetings (PrepComs) were held in order to identify conference themes and to create initial drafts of the Declaration and Programme of Action. These PrepComs encountered difficulties from the start.[5]
The first problem was the question of what the conference theme was to be. The Western European states, along with the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, all wanted the conference objectives to be those given in the authorizing resolution. The Africa Group, the Latin American states, and the Caribbean states wanted the conference objectives to go beyond what was in the resolution, and include items dealing with regional, national, and international measures for compensation for colonialism and slavery.[5]
Prior to the conference, there were also four Regional Conferences, in Strasbourg, Santiago, Dakar, and Tehran.[5]
The NGO Forum Declaration[edit]
The NGO Forum ran separately from the main conference in the nearby Kingsmead Stadium in Durban, from 28 August to 1 September. It consisted 3,000 NGOs, attended by 8,000 representatives. The declaration adopted by the NGO Forum was not an official document of the conference.[15][16][17]
The Forum's proceedings were highly disorganized, with several NGO delegates walking out of the Forum, to the jeers of other delegates, and ended in discord. The NGO Forum's declaration described Israel as a "racist, apartheid state" that was guilty of "racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing". The document was not intended to be presented to the Conference, although a copy of it was intended to be handed over, as a symbolic gesture, to the Conference secretary-general, Mary Robinson, at the conclusion of the Forum. Robinson refused to accept the document, citing concerns over its language. In a later interview she said of the whole conference that "there was horrible anti-Semitism present — particularly in some of the NGO discussions. A number people said they've never been so hurt or so harassed or been so blatantly faced with an anti-Semitism."[5][15][16][18]
Critics described the description of Israel as apartheid as the "Durban Strategy". They claim that this comparison was made with the intention of causing and encouraging divestment from and boycott of Israel.[19][20][21]
The NGO Forum was attended by U.S. NGOs, with financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. The Ford Foundation provided USD10 million in support to the WCAR and the NGO Forum. These NGOs provided research assistance at the Forum and helped to develop declarations and resolutions that dealt with the issue of compensation for slavery.[22][23]
The resolutions adopted by the Forum dealing with reparations for slavery dealt only with the transatlantic slave trade and did not mention the traffic in African slaves to Islamic lands in the Middle East. The Forum also called upon the United States to ratify all major human rights treaties that had already been ratified.[22]
One such treaty was the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which the U.S. had ratified in 1994, but (per the Supremacy Clause of Article Six of the United States Constitution, which does not permit treaties to override the Constitution) had attached a reservation that its ratification did not accept treaty requirements that were incompatible with the Constitution of the United States. The NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, demanded that U.S. drop its reservations and "comply" with the treaty. The U.S. Department of State had noted specifically that CERD's restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly were incompatible with the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The United States was far from the only such country to do so, however. Incompatibility of the treaty with national constitutions, including the freedoms of assembly and speech guaranteed by those constitutions, is also noted by Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, France, Guyana, Jamaica, Japan, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Switzerland, and Thailand. Several, including France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malta, Monaco, Nepal, the United Kingdom, note that they consider the provisions of the treaty to be restricted by and subject to the freedoms of speech and assembly set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[22][24]
According to John Font, in order to comply with the interpretation of CERD created by the NGOs at the Forum, the United States would have to "turn its political and economic system, together with their underlying principles, upside down — abandoning the free speech guarantees of the Constitution, bypassing federalism, and ignoring the very concept of majority rule since practically nothing in the NGO agenda is supported by the [U.S.] electorate".[22]
Tom Lantos assigns the blame for the withdrawal of the U.S. in part to the radicalism of many of the NGOs at the NGO Forum, to an inadequate response thereto by U.S.-based NGOs, and to the reluctance of the U.S.'s European allies to take a strong stand.[25]