Bush Urged to Support Anti-Racism Summit

NEW YORK -- Human Rights Watch today called on the United States to throw
its support behind an upcoming United Nations-sponsored World Conference
Against Racism.

The group is concerned that with only one month remaining before the summit
opens in Durban, South Africa, the United States had not yet even decided
whether to participate, and is providing only paltry financial support.

"The Bush administration needs to show that it really cares about the
problem of racism, in the United States and around the world," said Reed
Brody, Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch. "The way to do that is to
use this conference to press for concrete solutions and programs to address
the problem, not to sit on the sidelines."

The Bush administration is postponing a decision on summit participation
until it has assurances that the conference will not take up several
hot-button issues. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on June 20 in a
Senate hearing that matters like compensation for slavery and attacks on
Israel could derail the meeting and State Department spokesman Richard
Boucher has said the United States' participation depends on how these
topics are dealt with.

Human Rights Watch also is troubled that many countries were seeking to
single out Israel for condemnation of racist practices. While it has
documented and denounced Israeli abuses against Palestinians and called on
Israel to respect the right of Palestinian refugees to return, it stressed
that if the conference were going to name countries which practice severe
forms of racism, its list should be much longer.

At the same time, Human Rights Watch emphasized that if the United States
wants to influence the outcome of this debate, it must stay engaged. "The
Administration thinks it can delegitimize the conference by staying away,"
Brody said. "It's only going to succeed in ceding important decisions to
others."

A Bush administration paper has also warned the meeting not to apportion
blame for past injustices or to seek to exact compensation for these acts.
Human Rights Watch has said that governments should compensate groups that
suffer today because of slavery or other severe racist practices and it has
proposed the establishment of truth commissions to examine how a
government's past racist practices contribute to contemporary deprivation
and to propose methods of redress.

Human Rights Watch was also critical of the U.S. lack of financial support
for the meeting. The Clinton administration committed an initial $250,000
toward the conference before it left office, and the Bush administration
has not increased that. By contrast, the United States provided several
million dollars to the 1995 United Nations conference on women in Beijing.

Human Rights Watch said that it hopes that the conference, in addition to
addressing past injustices, will establish concrete programs to stamp out
racism today and that it will recognize caste-based discrimination as a
form of racism, address the racist treatment of refugees and migrants and
press governments to review how their laws and practices favor one race
over another.

The U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia
and Related Intolerance will meet from August 31 to September 7.

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