Wes­ley Gib­bings

For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an has met with his Ecuadore­an coun­ter­part, Ri­car­do Pati­no, as diplo­mat­ic ef­forts in­crease to en­cour­age T&T's sup­port for con­tentious pro­pos­als to re­form the In­ter-Amer­i­can hu­man rights sys­tem.

Yes­ter­day's meet­ing in Port-of-Spain pre­cedes Fri­day's Ex­tra­or­di­nary Gen­er­al As­sem­bly of the Or­gan­i­sa­tion of Amer­i­can States (OAS).It al­so fol­lows over 18 months of de­lib­er­a­tions by a spe­cial work­ing group con­vened to "re­flect on the work­ings of the In­ter-Amer­i­can Com­mis­sion on Hu­man Rights with a view to strength­en­ing the In­ter-Amer­i­can hu­man rights sys­tem."

The mea­sures have been round­ly crit­i­cised by hemi­spher­ic hu­man rights or­gan­i­sa­tions as an at­tempt to re­duce the pow­ers and in­flu­ence of the Wash­ing­ton-based In­ter-Amer­i­can Com­mis­sion on Hu­man Rights (IACHR).The Gen­er­al As­sem­bly is to con­sid­er a res­o­lu­tion re­plac­ing an ear­li­er ver­sion pre­sent­ed to the OAS Per­ma­nent Coun­cil last Wednes­day which at­tract­ed the fire of coun­tries such as the Unit­ed States, Cana­da, Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos.

Ac­cord­ing to diplo­mat­ic sources, Dook­er­an, will not be in at­ten­dance. He met with OAS As­sis­tant Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al, Al­bert Ramdin, on Fri­day.T&T al­so did not con­tribute to last week's de­bate on the draft res­o­lu­tion which in­clud­ed the de­ci­sions of a con­tro­ver­sial con­fer­ence of sub­scriber coun­tries to the Amer­i­can Con­ven­tion on Hu­man Rights, in Guayaquil, Ecuador on March 11.

T&T de­nounced the Con­ven­tion in 1998 in or­der to fa­cil­i­tate the ex­e­cu­tion of the Dole Chadee gang in 1999. On­ly six Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) coun­tries are ac­tive par­ties to the con­ven­tion.Dur­ing de­lib­er­a­tions by the OAS Per­ma­nent Coun­cil on the draft last Wednes­day, Cana­da's rep­re­sen­ta­tive to the OAS, Amb Al­lan Cul­ham, not­ed that his coun­try, which is not a state par­ty to the con­ven­tion, had been de­nied ob­serv­er sta­tus at the Guayaquil meet­ing.

He said the draft res­o­lu­tion was "un­bal­anced" and "not re­flec­tive of ex­pres­sions of the (OAS per­ma­nent) coun­cil. His US coun­ter­part, Amb Lawrence Gumbin­er said: "The res­o­lu­tion does not re­flect any of the dis­cus­sions that have tak­en place in 18 months" and was "re­flec­tive, al­most ver­ba­tim, of an ex­clu­sive meet­ing."

For his part, the first sec­re­tary of the Bar­ba­dos mis­sion to the OAS, Ri­car­do Kell­man, ex­pressed con­cern that "some have been left out­side the pale of the (Guayaquil) dis­cus­sion."

Though Bar­ba­dos was in­vit­ed and had planned to at­tend, changes with­in the coun­try's For­eign Af­fairs Min­istry fol­low­ing the Feb­ru­ary 21 gen­er­al elec­tion there had pre­vent­ed it from at­tend­ing the meet­ing.