Saturday, August 29, 2020

OP-ED -- Does the Canadian government really care about stopping genocide?

Aug. 25, 2020 
 
The international legal order and the human rights of vulnerable minorities around the world are under assault by autocratic regimes like never before as two foundational documents of the United Nations go ignored: the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As we mark the third anniversary this week of the atrocities which commenced the final phase of the Rohingya genocide by Myanmar, we have to question whether Canada truly believes in standing behind these two instruments which it signed, and whether it cares about stopping genocide.


Canada was intimately involved in drafting both of these documents, so it follows that as a democratic nation committed to the rule of law, Canada would be one of the nations that would ensure their enforcement. In fact, Canadians have often heard Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland state that Canada is a rule of law nation, supports the international legal order, and is a defender of human rights.

But such political rhetoric is meaningless without actions to back it up. 

In the fall of 2017 when the scale of atrocities committed by Myanmar against the Rohingya was front page news, many Canadians implored our government to designate the crimes as genocide and invoke the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: 
a)    Killing members of the group. 
b)    Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 
c)     Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. 
d)    Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. 
e)    Forcibly transferring children of one group to another group. 

However, instead of taking action, the government waited two months before it appointed a “special envoyto study the matter. Five months later when he issued his recommendations, the government proceeded to ignore most of them. 

When Canada did finally become the first nation to officially recognize the genocide by unanimous resolutions of both houses of our Parliament – a full year after the atrocities began – it did nothing more to hold Myanmar accountable, despite repeated calls by parliamentarians, human rights scholars, activists, and members of the Canadian Rohingya community. Arguably, as a state party to the Genocide Convention that recognized the Rohingya genocide, Canada is now duty bound to act to try to stop it and help prevent its recurrence. 

Rather than Canada, it was the tiny West African nation of Gambia that became the white knight for the long suffering Rohingya when it filed a complaint under the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice on Nov. 11, 2019. 

Canada’s lack of action in living up to its treaty obligations to defend the international legal order isn’t new. Canada failed to act in the case of the Rwandan genocide and in the Balkans genocide in the 1990s (despite the presence of Canadian troops on the ground in both instances). It was silent, along with the rest of the world, as the Darfur genocide unfolded and as Myanmar’s genocide agenda came to light in the 2000s. It has done nothing to respond to the genocide of the Uyghurs in China, and what appears to be the start of a genocide in India-occupied Kashmir. 

As it fails to live up to its obligations, the Canadian government also refuses to admit its hypocrisy of claiming to be a defender of human rights and the international legal order while doing little to nothing to defend it. It adds to that hypocrisy every year by intoning the mantra “never again” on Holocaust Remembrance Day marking the death of millions at the hands of the Nazis. Such hypocrisy is not lost on the international community and arguably contributed to Canada’s failed attempt to gain a seat on the UN Security Council. 
 
During a year which marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, and the 75th anniversary of the UN itself, it is time for the Justin Trudeau government to finally put actions behind its rhetoric. Because as it is, his government is losing all credibility on the international stage by claiming to be a defender of the international legal order and of human rights while its manifest failure to act demonstrates otherwise. 
 
Fareed Khan is the director of advocacy and media relations at the Rohingya Human Rights Network. 
 
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© 2020 The View From Here.  © 2020 Fareed Khan.  All Rights Reserved.

 


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