Africa wants racism, xenophobia criminalised

[XXPANTHAXX]

ABUJA--African nations decided on Tuesday to push for laws that prohibit
racism and xenophobia next year at an international conference to
discuss the practices.

Africa will specifically want the Geneva conference to provide for
sanctions "for those who violate the law" according to the action plan
by African governments and civil society organisations at the end of a
meeting in the Nigerian administrative capital on Tuesday.

"Prohibiting by law and adopting necessary policy measures to combat the
dissemination of all ideas based upon racial superiority or hatred and
incitement to hatred," will be part of Africa’s goals, read part of the
101 recommendations for the Geneva conference.

The Geneva conference due next April is to carry out a review of the
decisions taken at a similar meeting in 2001 in Durban, South Africa.

The three-day Abuja talks also recommended "protecting the human rights
of migrants whether regular or irregular" and "countering
anti-immigration ideologies advocating the criminalisation of irregular
migration."

A Geneva-based human rights group, UN Watch, however, slammed a document
adopted by the meeting saying that it threatened to "derail" the UN’s
follow up to the Durban conference.

The text according to UN-Watch’s executive director Hillel Neuer,
"flouts international human rights principles, and breaches the red
lines set by France, Britain, the Netherlands, and other Western states,
which they have warned could trigger their boycott of the 2009 meeting
in Geneva".

He said the meeting had failed to review African countries’ performance
on racism since 2001 conference. The rights watchdog also took at a
swipe at the text’s failure to "review the xenophobic attacks that
recently broke out in South Africa — the key organiser of the Abuja
meeting and the overall Durban process — where foreigners . . . were
targeted in May during a wave of anti-immigrant attacks."

At least 62 immigrants were killed and tens of thousands were displaced
during the attacks in South Africa.