Commonwealth Unions and Human Rights

The Commonwealth’s Foreign Ministers are meeting this weekend in New York.  A major piece of business will be approving the draft Charter of the Commonwealth, a summary of the values that bind the Commonwealth together.

The Commonwealth Trade Union Group (part of the ITUC), is calling for the Commonwealth to get tough on member states who abuse workers’ and other human rights. Trade unionists across the world will be lobbying their Governments over the next few days – in particular in Australia, where Labour Senator Bob Carr is the Foreign Minister who will chair the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers meeting.

At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth, Western Australia in October 2011, an Eminent Persons Group made a series of recommendations about the future of the Commonwealth. Many – both structural and political – were not accepted, such as a human rights commissioner, and support for LGBT equality. But two of the key agreements were:

(a)    that the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG, a sub-committee of the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers meeting, and the body with the power to suspend members of the Commonwealth) should be reformed to have a wider scope than democracy, ie covering human rights; and to have more powers to act, so that it could be more preventative; and

(b)   that there should be a Charter of the Commonwealth, bringing together existing documents such as the Harare Principles, and setting out the values of the Commonwealth.

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