UN official pledges continued support for national human rights bodies

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) will continue to support the work of national human rights institutions and their efforts to ensure that international human rights laws are incorporated into domestic legislation, the agency’s head said today.

The three pillars of the UN – peace and security, development and human rights – are closely interlinked, and thus there is a need to support national human rights organizations, which often lacked resources, capacity and expertise, said Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator.

“The denial of human rights and the persistence of exclusion, discrimination, and lack of accountability are barriers to the pursuit of human development and the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals],” Miss Clark told a gathering of national human rights bodies in Geneva.

“Global, regional, and national human rights institutions can play and are playing a critical role in overcoming those barriers,” she told members of the International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.

She said that although significant progress and been made in reducing global poverty and child mortality, and there had been improvements in primary school enrolment and access to safe drinking water even in some of the poorest countries, there still remained groups of populations who continued to lag behind.

“In particular, women, rural inhabitants, ethnic minorities, and other excluded groups often lag well behind national averages in progress on MDG targets – even when nations as a whole are moving towards the goals,” Miss Clark said.

She said the society could learn form human rights approaches which sought to address the root causes of development problems, and quoted former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who once said: “Human rights can be found at the heart of every major challenge facing humanity.”