By Mark Kennedy, Postmedia NewsOctober 23, 2011

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivers a statement in this file photo.

Photograph by: Chris Wattie, REUTERS

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper travels to Australia this week to attend a Commonwealth leaders’ summit that will be dominated by debate over human rights and which could expose divisions within the 54-nation organization.

The biennial gathering, known as the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), is being held in Perth, Australia.

It comes just days before some of the leaders, including Harper, also travel in early November to Cannes, France for a critical G20 summit — where the growing global economic instability will require critical decisions by world leaders.

At the Commonwealth meeting, the urgent need for tough political calls will also be on the table. Among the reasons why:

• Leaders will discuss the 205-page report of an Eminent Persons Group they appointed two years ago to provide advice on how to modernize the Commonwealth. Its report, leaked to the media last week, contains a blistering conclusion: Without urgent reforms and a proactive approach by the Commonwealth to ensure its member nations abide by human-rights principles, the 62-year-old association will become irrelevant and will eventually cease to exist.

The advisory group has made 106 recommendations, including the establishment of a Charter of the Commonwealth and the appointment of a Commissioner for Democracy, the Rule of Law and Human Rights to keep track of whether member nations are persistently violating human rights, and who would also recommend “remedial action.”

• The leaders will discuss another yet-to-be-released report — this one by the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG), a panel of nine foreign ministers charged with protecting the Commonwealth’s fundamental political values against “serious or persistent violations.” Its recommendations focus on how to keep better tabs on nations that violate core values, and how the Commonwealth can adopt “proactive and positive” ways to keep the countries in line.

• Discrimination against gays and lesbians by some of the Commonwealth nations will be discussed. In 41 of the organization’s countries, being gay constitutes a crime. Australia is urging other countries to repeal those laws, and Canada’s foreign affairs minister, John Baird, concurs, saying it is “completely unacceptable that homosexuality continues to be criminalized in a majority of Commonwealth countries.”

• Sri Lanka is scheduled to host the next Commonwealth summit in 2013, but the country is under attack for alleged human rights violations and war crimes in the final days of its civil war with the Tamil Tigers in 2009. It is refusing to heed calls for an international investigation into those allegations, which has annoyed some other Commonwealth nations.

Harper has adopted a high-profile stance, threatening to boycott the 2013 summit unless Sri Lanka shows “progress” on accountability for the alleged human-rights violations.

Sri Lanka’s high commissioner to Canada, Chitranganee Wagiswara, told Postmedia News that her country does not want the issue raised at the summit in Australia. She denied allegations that Sri Lanka committed human rights violations, stressing that the government was fighting a war against terrorism when it defeated the Tamil Tigers.

Also at the Commonwealth summit, political leaders are expected to discuss other priorities — climate change, global economic uncertainty, food security, and natural resource management.

But it’s the debate on human rights that has the potential of turning the summit into a stormy occasion.

Countries such as Canada, Britain and Australia are said to be in favour of embracing the call for Commonwealth reform.

“Canada will be taking a very active role in Perth to ensure the issue of human rights is front and centre,” Baird told MPs last week.

But some others within the organization — which spans regions ranging from Africa to the Caribbean to South Asia — are apparently apprehensive.

The report by the 11-person panel of eminent people, which includes Canadian senator Hugh Segal, says the Commonwealth has a “proud record” in past times of responding to serious violations of human rights by its member countries — including apartheid in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, the “excesses” of dictator Idi Amin in Uganda, and military coups in Nigeria, Fiji, Sierra Leone and Pakistan.

In each case, the Commonwealth intervened, through actions ranging from condemnation to sanctions such as suspension from the organization.

“In recent years, however, there has been a growing criticism that the Commonwealth does not take a stand, at least in public, on violations of its values by its member states, other than in the case of the unconstitutional removal of governments,” says the report.

"This failure by the Commonwealth is seen as a decay that has set in to the body of the organization and one that will occasion the association’s irrelevance — if not its actual demise — unless it is promptly addressed.”

In particular, it says the Commonwealth’s secretary general — currently Kamalesh Sharma, of India — should be more publicly proactive instead of using behind-the-scenes diplomacy when member states persistently violate democratic or human rights principles.

“This has substantially weakened the fabric of the association and the promise of vigilance and action it has held out to the people of the Commonwealth,” says the report. “Silence should not be an option.”

mkennedy@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/Mark—Kennedy

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