Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser made an 11th hour plea for a commonwealth human rights watchdog on Friday night.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has indicated this week that a commonwealth human rights commissioner was unlikely.
Instead on Friday, she spruiked the benefits of leaders at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth having decided to strengthen the powers of the existing Commonwealth ministerial action group to intervene in human rights matters.
But Mr Fraser, a human rights campaigner who helped end apartheid in South Africa while part of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, told a Commonwealth Round Table public lecture at Murdoch University on Friday that the Commonwealth had to show leadership.
This included having a “report card’’ on all Commonwealth nations from an independent body.
Mr Fraser said this should be appointed to examine practices of members, whether it was in the rule of law, the treatment of refugees and indigenous people, or the status of women.
He hoped commonwealth nations would adopt recommendations of a yet to be published wide-ranging reform report compiled by the 11-member Eminent Persons Group, which advocated appointing an independent commonwealth human rights commissioner.
Outside the lecture, he said a ministerial group would be limited by its membership of ministers who were beholden to their governments.
He also reiterated his view that Sri Lanka should be stripped of the right to host the next CHOGM in 2013 if the island nation did not address war crimes allegations.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is in Perth for the CHOGM, amid accusations that the 2009 defeat of guerrilla group the Tamil Tigers, saw tens of thousands of Tamil civilians killed by army shelling, and that the army shelled hospitals and denied civilians humanitarian aid, which Sri Lanka denies occurred.
Mr Fraser said Sri Lanka should examine allegations by the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the International Crisis Group, who concluded that “serious war crimes were committed by both government forces and by the Tamils’’.
“If an international investigation demonstrated that that had happened, then indictments should follow,’’ he said.
“But the Canadian Prime Minister (Stephen Harper) was right, if nothing is done, there’s no improvement, no change, the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting should not be in Sri Lanka.’’
During his lecture, Mr Fraser hit out at the compromising of “basic democratic rights’’ among a number of countries, who had “gone too far’’ in the fight against terror since 9-11.
Mr Fraser also targeted the treatment of refugees as an area where the Commonwealth could show leadership.
He said that in 1951 the United Nations adopted the Refugee Convention that established rights for refugees and obligations for nations who acceded to the convention, and it specified that refugees often travelled by “unorthodox means, and often without papers’’.
Yet, he said, there was “a great deal of criticism about boats and people smuggling’’. But people should not forget that many who had fled Soviet dominated eastern Europe, paid for their passage to a “place of safety’’. -PerthNow