Burundi closes human rights office

Burundi has forced the United Nations to shut its local human rights office after 23 years, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said. 

Background 

Burundi is a landlocked country amid the African Great Lakes region where East and Central Africa converge. The capital is Gitega, having moved from Bujumbura in February 2019. The southwestern border is adjacent to Lake Tanganyika.

Burundi gained independence in 1962 and initially had a monarchy, but a series of assassinations, coups and a general climate of regional instability culminated in the establishment of a republic and one-party state in 1966. Bouts of ethnic cleansing and ultimately two civil wars and genocides during the 1970s and again in the 1990s left the country undeveloped and its population as one of the world's poorest

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (commonly known as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)) is a department of the Secretariat of the United Nations that works to promote and protect the human rights that are guaranteed under international law and stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The office was established by the UN General Assembly on 20 December 1993 in the wake of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights. 

The current High Commissioner is Michelle Bachelet of Chile who took the office on 1 September 2019.

Analysis 

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said the Burundian government had declared it had made sufficient progress in human rights so the U.N. rights office in Bujumbura was no longer justified.

Hundreds of Burundians have been killed in clashes with security forces and half a million have fled abroad since President Pierre Nkurunziza announced in 2015, he would run for a third term in what many saw as a breach of the constitution.

He won re-election and in 2016 Burundi suspended all cooperation with the U.N. human rights office in Burundi after a U.N.-commissioned report accused the Bujumbura government and its supporters of being responsible for crimes against humanity.

“It is with deep regret that we have had to close our office in Burundi after a 23-year presence in the country,” Bachelet, a former Chilean president, said in a statement.

She said advancements in human rights in Burundi had been jeopardised since 2015 when Nkurunziza announced his re-election bid, which sparked major protests and a security crackdown.

Burundi rejected the 2016 U.N. report as “lies” and when the U.N. Human Rights Council considered renewing the investigation in 2017, Burundi offered to accept U.N. rights experts instead. However, the rights council voted both to renew the investigation and to send the experts, infuriating the Bujumbura government.

Burundi subsequently threatened to prosecute the rights council’s team of investigators and accused its chairman of “selling” Africans like in the era of slavery, a comment that outraged Bachelet.

The government also threw out the three visiting U.N. human rights experts it had promised to cooperate with, accusing them of arriving unannounced and acting like spies.

U.N. human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said senior Burundian officials who met Bachelet last week told her they were prepared to accept technical assistance such as human rights training and advice on legislation.

However, Burundi had also shown “a serious lack of cooperation” with other U.N. human rights bodies in Geneva, and Burundian officials had left halfway through a review into use of torture in the country, Shamdasani said.

She said there were still credible reports of serious human rights violations in Burundi, including arbitrary killings, forced disappearances, ill-treatment, arrests and detention, and curbs on freedom of association, expression and movement.

Assessment 

Our assessment is that the closure of an OHCHR office in any country is a sign of the government trying to silence criticism of its human rights record. We believe that Burundi has to present a credible explanation for the closure of the office, particularly in a country which is prone to inter-ethnic conflicts. 

Image Courtesy: Romano1246 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Geneve_Palais_Wilson_2011-07-29_12_55_33_PICT3624.JPG), „Geneve Palais Wilson 2011-07-29 12 55 33 PICT3624“, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode