GCC to set up human rights panel
Published: Jul 16, 2010 00:09 Updated: Jul 16, 2010 00:09
RIYADH: The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has finalized a plan to set up a human rights panel in the region. This new regional commission for human rights, which will have independent and impartial experts as its members and office bearers, will deal with human rights issues and ensure more accurate auditing of the human rights records in the region.
“The move to set up this regional panel comes following a recommendation made by the GCC foreign ministers in a meeting last month,” said a statement released by the GCC General Secretariat on Wednesday.
The foreign ministers of the GCC member states have endorsed the plan for the regional commission, which will be the first regional body of its kind in this part of the world.
“The endorsement to create this regional body is an important step forward in the establishment of the new mechanism to protect rights of the Gulf citizens and ensure more protection to the growing number of migrant workers,” said a GCC human rights official, who preferred to remain anonymous.
He pointed out that similar human right bodies — both private and government-controlled — are already in existence and are functioning well in other regions, including Africa, the Americas and Europe.
The panel will also be entrusted with the task to highlight the steps taken by the GCC states to improve the human rights situation of the Gulf citizens in line with Arab and Islamic values. The move is significant keeping in view the fact that all Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE — have often found and complained that the reports issued by some international organizations tend to undervalue or ignore the GCC’s achievements in the field of human rights.
The GCC countries, which is home to an estimated 20 million foreign workers, including nine million living and working in Saudi Arabia, have several human-rights-related problems. Many of them are illegal overstayers, runaway workers and criminals with proven complicity in petty crimes. On the regional front, all individual states have exerted efforts to boost their performance on the scale of human rights records, said the statement.
Saudi Arabia has announced plans to introduce the subject of human rights in its educational syllabus for students at all levels. The project is in its final stages at the Ministry of Higher Education.

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Jul 16, 2010 18:44
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