22 eksperter: Menneskerettigheder er selve grundlaget for udvikling

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Bør stå i slutdokumentet fra den store opfølgningskonference om verdensmiljøet, der holdes til juni i Rio, mener de – og peger på, at alle erfaringer tilsiger, at uden klare vedtagelser og internationale regelsæt går det ikke.

NEW YORK, 19 March 2012: A group of independent United Nations experts Monday urged States to include universally agreed international human rights norms and standards, as well as accountability (holden-til-regnskab) mechanisms, in the goals that will emerge from a UN sustainable development Conference in June.

“Global goals are easily set, but seldom met,” said the 22 human rights experts in an open letter to governments, as the first round of informal negotiations ahead of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) opened in New York.

“A real risk exists that commitments made in Rio [de Janeiro] will remain empty promises without effective monitoring and accountability.”

“Human rights have guided 60-plus years of progress by providing a legal baseline for political actions. Human rights must now be the glue in Rio: they must bind countries to the commitments they make. States have an opportunity in Rio to create the transformative changes needed or else fare no better than in previous global attempts in this regard,” they stressed

The Rio+20 conference, to be held from 20 to 22 June in Brazil, is expected to lay the foundation for a set of global sustainable development goals to complement and strengthen the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – 2015 Målene, the anti-poverty and social development targets that have an achievement deadline of 2015.

“Learning from the mistakes of the Millennium Development Goals, the new sustainable goals must integrate the full range of human rights linked with sustainable development, and human rights must be the benchmark (pejlemærke) for whether or not inclusive, equitable (ligelig fordelt) and sustainable development is occurring,” the independent experts said.

Two decades after the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, and 10 years after the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, the mounting effects of climate change and environmental degradation (nedslidning) have raised the stakes, they said.

Both the goals to be elaborated in Rio and the means of reviewing progress must be based on human rights, they added.

They suggested that Rio+20 establish an international accountability mechanism similar to the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review, which subjects each country’s human rights record to a State-led peer review on the basis of information submitted by the country concerned, UN entities, civil society and other stakeholders (aktører).

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