World Conference Against Racism 2001 - The NGO Forum Declaration

The NGO Forum Declaration

Separate from the actual Conference itself was an NGO Forum, held in the nearby Kingsmead Stadium in Durban, that ran from 2001-08-28 to 2001-09-01. This was a forum of 3,000 NGOs, attended by 8,000 representatives. It, too adopted a Declaration. However, this was not an official document of the WCAR and was not issued as such.

The Forum's proceedings were highly disorganized, with several NGO delegates walking out of the Forum, to the jeers of other delegates, and ending in discord; and the resultant declaration had 62 paragraphs of introduction, followed by a document that appeared to commentators as being the result of every lobby putting its pet aversions in. It described Israel as a "racist, apartheid state" that was guilty of "racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing". The document was not intended to be presented to the Conference, although a copy of it was intended to be handed over, as a symbolic gesture, to the Conference secretary-general, Mary Robinson, at the conclusion of the Forum. Ms Robinson refused to accept the document, citing concerns over its language. In a later interview she said of the whole conference that "there was horrible anti-Semitism present — particularly in some of the NGO discussions. A number people said they've never been so hurt or so harassed or been so blatantly faced with an anti-Semitism." The Palestinian Solidarity Committee of South Africa reportedly distributed copies of the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Critics described the description of Israel as apartheid as the "Durban Strategy". They claim that this comparison was made with the intention of causing and encouraging divestment from and boycott of Israel.

The NGO Forum was attended by U.S. NGOs, with financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. The Ford Foundation provided USD10 million in support to the WCAR and the NGO Forum. These NGOs provided research assistance at the Forum and helped to develop declarations and resolutions that dealt with the issue of compensation for slavery.

The resolutions adopted by the Forum dealing with reparations for slavery dealt only with the transatlantic slave trade, and did not mention the traffic in African slaves to Islamic lands in the Middle East. The Forum also called upon the United States to ratify all major human rights treaties that had already been ratified.

One such treaty was the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which the U.S. had ratified in 1994, but (per the Supremacy Clause of Article Six of the United States Constitution, which does not permit treaties to override the Constitution) had attached a reservation that its ratification did not accept treaty requirements that were incompatible with the Constitution of the United States. The NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, demanded that U.S. drop its reservations and "comply" with the treaty. The U.S. Department of State had noted specifically that CERD's restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly were incompatible with the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The United States was far from the only such country to do so, however. Incompatibility of the treaty with national constitutions, including the freedoms of assembly and speech guaranteed by those constitutions, is also noted by Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, France, Guyana, Jamaica, Japan, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Switzerland, and Thailand. Several, including France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malta, Monaco, Nepal, the United Kingdom, note that they consider the provisions of the treaty to be restricted by and subject to the freedoms of speech and assembly set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

One commentator noted that in order to comply with the interpretation of CERD created by the NGOs at the Forum, the United States would have to "turn its political and economic system, together with their underlying principles, upside down — abandoning the free speech guarantees of the Constitution, bypassing federalism, and ignoring the very concept of majority rule, since practically nothing in the NGO agenda is supported by the electorate", stating that these NGOs were "a new challenge to liberal democracy" that contested the principles of individual rights, democratic representation, and national citizenship, along with the contesting the very idea of a liberal democratic nation-state.

Other NGO demands included demands for:

• U.S. acknowledgement of "the breadth and pervasiveness of institutional racism" that "permeates every institution at every level"
• a declaration that "racial bias corrupts every stage of the criminal justice process, from suspicion to investigation, arrest, prosecution, trial, and sentencing"
• support for and expansion of hate crimes legislation at both state and federal levels
• U.S. condemnation of any opposition to affirmative action
• U.S. recognition of an adequate standard of living as "a right, not a privilege"
• a statement that the U.S. deplored the "denial of economic rights"
• the promotion of multilingualism by the U.S. instead of "discriminatory" emphasis on English language acquisition in U.S. schools
• the denunciation of free market capitalism as a "fundamentally flawed system"

Tom Lantos assigns the blame for the withdrawal of the U.S. in part to the radicalism of many of the NGOs at the NGO Forum, to an inadequate response thereto by U.S.-based NGOs, and to the reluctance of the U.S.'s European allies to take a strong stand.