Human rights advocate calls for accountability.

Byline: Rebecca Nolan The Register-Guard

Former president of Ireland and United Nations high commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson told an audience gathered at the University of Oregon that the countries of the world must use the standards in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ensure that the trend toward globalization is ethical and moral.

Robinson, current director of the Ethical Globalization Initiative and president of Oxfam International, a multi-national group working to solve poverty and other issues, came to Eugene on Wednesday at the request of UO law professor Svitlana Kravchenko to discuss the relationship between globalization and human rights.

Globalization refers most simply to the constant merging of economies and societies, Robinson said.

The phenomenon has led to growing access to cheaper goods and resources, revolutionized communications, and the global spread of ideas and technology - but the benefits have been unevenly distributed, she said.

People in developing countries have been left behind and even harmed by globalization, with 54 countries poorer now than in 1990, she said.

"Worldwide, the number of people living in a chronic state of poverty and daily insecurity hasn't changed much since 1990," she said.

She said in two hours - as long as her talk - that 1,000 children would die unnecessarily of poverty and hunger.

"A world connected by technology, information, exports and commerce must also be connected by a core set of values," she said. Those values exist, but it is up to the people to force governments to act on them.

Many counties ratify treaties and make other commitments regarding human rights, but they're "paper commitments" and not implemented, she said. People must hold governments accountable, she said.

That has become more difficult since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent erosion of democratic values in the United States, which until now had been the standard by which other countries' human rights policies had been measured, Robinson said. During her final year as high commissioner, she publicly criticized U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, those being detained indefinitely on immigration holds and the treatment of people classified as unlawful combatants, because other countries use the erosion of human rights in the United States to justify their own abuses, she said.

Overall, human insecurity has increased since Sept. 11 despite new security measures, she said.

The poor and hungry remain poor and hungry, and the developed world lives in fear of biological, chemical and other terrorist attacks. Europe has cracked down on migration, forcing refugees into the hands of criminal gangs that traffic in human beings for sex and labor, she said.

Meanwhile, progress made at the start of the new century, with the adoption of the United Nations Millennium Declaration that identified goals such as the end of absolute poverty and hunger by 2015, to be achieved within set time periods, has slowed, she said.

Ultimately, change starts on the local level, she said, quoting from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, "Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible."

The clear inference, Robinson said, is that "not only do you have a duty, but you must do something about it."