The world’s democracy and human rights advocates need to develop genuinely global responses and new approaches to deal with the current authoritarian offensive against fundamental freedoms of association and expression, former Czech President Vaclav Havel told a Washington meeting last night.
There is a compelling moral imperative for solidarity with dissidents within totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, from Cuba to Burma, North Korea to Belarus, he said, addressing the opening session of the Human Rights Summit by video link from Prague.
The international human rights community should develop a coordinated campaign to nominate Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize. There is no more fitting recipient than the imprisoned dissident, a co-author of the Charter 08 democratic manifesto modeled on the Czech dissidents’ Charter 77.
Former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo also highlighted the need for cross-border approaches.
“Democracy has no nationality”, he said, insisting on the indivisibility of human rights struggles, whether pressing for the release of dissidents like Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi or for the social and economic rights of Latin America’s poor.
Toledo invoked his personal history, rising from a poor, indigenous family of 16 children – several of whom died young – to call for a “democracy that delivers”, that addresses the material needs and socio-economic inequalities that disempower citizens who nevertheless may enjoy certain constitutional freedoms.
The speeches by Havel and Toledo, both leading democracy and civil society activists before coming to office, launched the 2010 Washington Human Rights Summit organized by Freedom House and Human Rights First.
Under the rubric of Affirming Fundamental Freedoms, the meeting will produce an action plan for the Obama Administration, reflecting the deliberations of a new generation of dissidents and human rights advocates with U.S. policy makers, representatives of democratic governments, and opinion-formers and activists from the media, think tanks, academia, and civil society.
Participants include several grantees and partners of the National Endowment for Democracy, including Yuri Dzhibladze, president of Russia’s Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, Carlos Ponce of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy, and Sharon Hom, Executive Director of Human Rights in China.
The meeting will also receive a special statement from imprisoned democracy advocate Yevgeny Zhovtis, head of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights, a member of the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy.
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