Honduras: Ten Human Rights Issues to be addressed

There's a lot more, documenting problems specific to 2011, and it would be well worth reading, especially for those who make policy about US relations to Honduras.

The report on Honduras ends with ten specific recommendations for the government of Honduras:

1. Assure that the justice system provides effective access to justice for all people.

2. Investigate, judge, and discipline those responsible for human rights violations.

3. Stop the illegal groups that act with impunity outside of the law. The state has the responsibility to dismantle the armed civilian groups that function outside the law and to punish the illegal actions they commit to prevent the recurrence of violence in the future.

4. To prevent the murders, threats, and intimidation against human rights defenders, journalists, radio reporters, and social leaders and to implement the protections authorized by the CIDH.

5. To carry out, urgently, investigations by independent groups to clarify and determine if the murder of human rights activists, social leaders, journalists, radio broadcasters and members of the Resistance are related to the exercise of their profession or in the context of the 2009 coup. Also to judge and condemn those responsible for those murders.

6. To make amends to the victims of human rights violations.

7. Guarantee conditions so that human rights defenders and labor rights defenders can freely carry out their duties, and to abstain from adopting legislation that limits or places obstacles on their work.

8. Improve the security of the citizens and order that the military and military intelligence do not participate in actions of citizen security, and when there are exceptional circumstances, that they subordinate themselves to civilian authority.

9. Make available the necessary measures so that women who are victims of violence have access to adequate judicial protection and adopt legal and judicial mechanisms to investigate, punish, and aid those reporting violence against women.

10. Make available the necessary measures to protect sectors of the Honduran population historically marginalized and highly vulnerable such as children, the LGBT community and the indigenous and Garifuna communities.

Most of these are points that should not need to be made; they are basic to human rights; yet the CIDH found it necessary to repeat them to the Honduran government.

The Honduran government wants credit for reforming the institutions of human rights, and the CIDH gives them credit for beginning institutional reforms that normally would lead to improved human rights if operationalized.

Unfortunately for Honduras, so far, these are only institutional reforms which have brought about no changes in the lived experience of everyday Hondurans.

That's why the CIDH report is important. Posted by RNS at 10:30 AM