Wednesday, September 13, 2006

HAVANA, Cuba (AFP): A leading Cuban dissident Tuesday slammed the Non-Aligned Movement, in the second day of a summit here, for not making human rights a real priority, and failing to defend personal and political freedoms.

"It is regrettable that the human rights issue is not a real and genuine priority in the Non-Aligned Movement," Elizardo Sanchez, who leads the Cuban Committee for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said in a statement.

Cuba, which is hosting the NAM summit of more than 100 countries in Havana, is the only one-party communist ruled nation in the Americas.

In a draft of the summit's final document, NAM members call for promoting "all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all."

Members do not, however, define their concept of human rights. Their political systems run the gamut from one party-communist rule as in Cuba, to Arab royal rule, to theocracy, to western-style democracies.

For Cuba's top diplomat Felipe Perez Roque, "the diversity that characterizes our movement, far from becoming an obstacle preventing us from reaching harmonization, must be the driving force for us to act united in light of the principles and purposes that we have jointly defined."

But Sanchez regretted that "most of the member governments of the NAM and especially its most active and 'historic' leaders persist in juxtaposing rights of the human person, and try to justify for example grave violations of civil and political rights with the supposed or real 'achievements' in the area of social rights."

"It is worth mentioning the cases ... of Cuba and North Korea, where there are schools for all children, and no one is excluded from basic health care, but any moderately informed person knows the governments violate all civil, political and economic rights of their citizens," he added, in an unusually pointed critique.

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