I have written earlier about the wisdom of having purely governmental human rights awards. Now Canada adds to the discussion:
In my article for Oxford University Press (“Human Rights Awards for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders” J Hum Rights Pract (2013) 5 p552) I wrote: “A word of caution with regard to ‘governmental’ awards is in order. While it is one thing for a government to ‘support’ (e.g. financially) an otherwise independent award with an autonomous jury, the notion that governments (such as the USA, the Netherlands, France, Poland, Sweden, Canada) should run their own awards, select the winner, have the Minister hand it out and promote the award through the diplomatic service, does not sit well with the desire to protect HRDs from the charge of being ‘foreign agents’, a frequent claim by repressive governments trying to depict HRDs as being supported and funded from abroad… A degree of distance would benefit governments and would also serve the laureates themselves who usually want to be seen as spearheading the non-governmental human rights movement. Intergovernmental organizations face similar problems in having awards, as was demonstrated by the controversy surrounding UNESCO’s decision in 2010 to launch an award paid for and named after the president/dictator of Equatorial Guinea, Obiang Nguema.”
In a post of 2011 I expressed some doubt about the USA State Department giving an award to Cuba dissidents (see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2011/04/24/us-state-department-gives-its-human-rights-defenders-award-to-cuban-ladies-in-white-how-wise/).
A recent article (5 March 2017) by Dean Beeby of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) entitled “Diefenbaker award missing in action after Liberals take over” brings home another aspect, namely that such an award becomes a ‘political tit-for-tat’. An award created by Stephen Harper’s government, which honoured former Progressive Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker, was inaugurated in early 2011 and given out for four years running before ‘disappearing’ in 2015 and 2016. Read the rest of this entry »
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 