Thank you very much, Chair.
As I mentioned to the clerk of the committee, I really have to confine my remarks I think to the role and the time that I was involved in the truth and reconciliation commission that was mandated and sat from April 2010 to July 2011.
I have not followed Honduran events since that time. One moves on to other things, I guess. I will make comments about the commission, about it's principal findings, it's principal recommendations, and an evaluation of the commission work as it relates to the human rights situation we were looking at.
The truth and reconciliation commission was established by the Government of Honduras, by President Pepe Lobo. Most truth and reconciliation commissions are established by a government; otherwise they would not have an opportunity to get into the records and have as much freedom of movement.
It was a simple mandate really to examine the events leading up to the July 28, 2009, expulsion of President Zelaya, and then to present recommendations to ensure that such events, such a failure of governance, would not happen again.
Interestingly enough, human rights per se or an investigation of human rights per se were not a formal part of the mandate as it was established by the decree.
The commission itself met for about 450 days with the five commissioners. I was the Canadian commissioner, the chair was Guatemalan, one other commissioner was a former minister of justice of Peru and a supreme court justice herself, and then there were two Honduran commissioners—one was the current, at that time, president of the national university and the other was her predecessor. Interestingly enough, each of these two Honduran commissioners had contacts on either side of the political centre, so they were really well connected from left to right.
The commission visited all 18 Honduran provinces and held over 300 meetings, including 20 town halls of people in the very small pueblos or towns around the country. They received testimony from about 150 personalities that were linked to the events of the time of the coup. They collected some 50,000 pages of documentation and stored about 900 items in the video tech; many of our interviews were actually videoed.
The total budget was about $2.5 million for the commission, which by most accounts is not a large amount of money. The commission, however, decided on its own that it was very important to look at the human rights aspects of the situation, in particular during the interim government of Mr. Micheletti. The commission contracted four human rights experts who were selected by the United Nations development program. That was financed by the European Union. They were separate but reported to us, and we took over and put into our own words their report to us.
Those experts operated for about one year and received confidential testimony from approximately 250 victims of alleged human rights abuses. They travelled around the country, as did we, but separately.
The opposition in Honduras, called La Resistencia, established its own what was called Comision de la Verdad, or truth commission. Our commission did attempt several times to contact them to see if we could cooperate together, but for reasons that only that commission best knows, they decided they would prefer to operate on their own, and in fact I believe they did a separate report completely from ours.
Briefly, the key findings from our truth and reconciliation commission found that the forceable removal and extradition of President Zelaya constituted a definite coup d'état. The executive and legislative judicial branches, however, all transgressed the constitution leading up to, during, and after the coup. It was basically a failure of government by the three branches of government.
Micheletti became de facto president on the expulsion of President Zelaya, and he stayed there until the inauguration of President Lobo—the election was in November—in January of 2010. Given the fact that he actually relinquished power at the time of the elections in November 2010, in what we felt were fair and free elections given the circumstances of Honduras at the time, our conclusion was that the election and government of President Lobo itself should be considered a legitimate government.
We felt from our investigations that both the Zelaya and Micheletti regimes had engaged in certain corrupt practices, and finally that there was a range of human rights abuses, including police violence and murder, that occurred and went unpunished during the Micheletti regime of about five months, from July 2009 to December 2009, the same year.
Our key recommendations covered two basic areas: governance on one side, because we felt that the failure of governance had led to the coup, and on the other side the human rights issues. The key recommendations on governance included the following.
The constitution should be amended to add a procedure for the impeachment of the president and senior officials following due process. One of the problems in the constitution was that there was no legal process to impeach President Zelaya should there have been a reason to do so.
Secondly, consideration should be given to passing legislation to hold a constituent assembly in order to review the entrenched powers of the constitution, including the possibility of presidential re-election. It may be remembered that one of the reasons why the military moved against President Zelaya was the impression—although never proven—that he was seeking a second term.
The third recommendation was that political functions that are undertaken by the military should be removed from their mandate. In the Honduran constitution, the military has certain policing powers that we felt were wrong, and they also had the mandate to distribute ballot boxes during the election and to safeguard the election itself. We felt this was not an appropriate use of the armed forces of Honduras.
Fourth, a judicial tribunal should be established with authority to arbitrate disputes between the executive and legislative branches of government. Honduras, like the United States, has divided powers, which occasionally come into dispute. Unfortunately, the judiciary were unable to deal with this. We felt that a judicial tribunal should be established to arbitrate disputes among the three branches.
Fifth, the political parties' machinery should be reformed so as to ensure financial and electoral transparency while including its caucus members in decision-making. We found that the democratic party structure in Honduras was highly undemocratic in terms of excluding members from participating in caucus and indeed the party leadership determining who should be running in different constituencies rather than having an iterative process between the caucus and the leadership.
Finally, under governance, appointments to high-level judicial and legislative watchdog bodies—for example, the superior tribunal of elections—should be depoliticized and should be on the basis of impartial decisions rather than at the will of political representatives of the governing party.
On the human rights side, the commission came up with seven principal recommendations. The first was that the government should pursue, prosecute, and punish perpetrators of human rights abuses during the Micheletti regime, ensuring, however, that due process is observed to those who are accused of human rights abuses.
Secondly, a national plan of reparations should be established, to include restitution, indemnification, and guarantees of protection against reprisals for those having legitimate and verifiable human rights grievances.
Third, the prosecutor general office should be provided with sufficient resources and independence to enable it to establish an investigating unit to respond promptly to future human rights complaints.
Fourth, the actions of the human rights commissioner during the Micheletti regime should be reviewed by an independent committee of Congress. There was a human rights commissioner throughout the Micheletti period. Our commission felt he had not performed according to the terms of reference.
Fifth, the government should review, and as necessary revise, legislation to ensure compatibility with international norms and standards, especially with respect to personal security related to freedom of expression, particularly for journalists, and freedom of association. We felt that the Honduran legislation was lacking in terms of international norms and standards.
Sixth, access by tribal and indigenous people to justice in their own language should be guaranteed. In the Mosquito area, on the coast of Honduras, which we visited, a number of the aboriginal peoples were complaining about not being able to receive justice in their own language.
Finally, the government should ensure compliance with the International Labour Organization convention regarding the duty to consult about the use and exploitation of natural resources in aboriginal territories—a problem I'm sure you're aware of, which is very much indigenous to Central America, where mining companies do not always respect the laws of the aboriginal areas.
Let me give, then, a final brief evaluation of the human rights section of our report.
Internationally, and to some extent domestically, interest in the work and findings of the commission centred on its examination of the human rights situation in the period July 28, 2009, to January 18, 2010, the inauguration of Pepe Lobo. The commission concluded that violations were broadly prevalent during the five months of the Micheletti government. There are indeed factors that might explain, but certainly not excuse, the excessive use of force during this period. There is in Honduras a traditional culture of violence, decentralized control over widely and thinly dispersed police forces, and a lack of professional training at the operational level of the police.
The small country at this time was also suffering a collective paranoia, quite honestly, out of its isolation from the international community, exacerbated by its former president, President Zelaya, testing its borders, with support from such South American heavy-hitters as Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina. In fact, we concluded that the fact that the OAS expelled Honduras so rapidly—the only other country to be expelled from the OAS, of course, being Cuba—took the OAS out of any brokering or mediating role to try to bring the situation back to a more stable situation, and to some extent, the Hondurans rallied against the OAS at that time.
That said, however, there could never be any justification for the complicity of the senior levels of government, reaching to Micheletti himself, in condoning police violence, in failing to investigate obvious politically inspired assassinations, or in restricting freedom of movement through the imposition of extended curfews without corresponding constitutional authority.
The human rights situation during this period, although grave, remained limited in scope and time compared to the horrors of violations involving mass killings in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Argentina or the torture and targeted assassinations in Peru and Chile at an earlier time. We do not feel they were of that scope, but they were definitely to be condemned.
The failure of institutions, the lack of clarity of governing precepts stemming from a weak constitutional regime, and an insufficiently rooted democratic construct were the principal factors leading to the coup. These inadequacies created the conditions that allowed for the complicity of the Micheletti ad hoc government in the perpetration of violations with respect to personal liberties and security. This assessment in the latter half of 2009 impelled the commission to focus extensively on Honduras's governance regime and to concentrate much of its work on developing recommendations not only to reinforce the rule of law but to find ways to broaden citizens' access to the law. This emphasis also corresponded to a consistent refrain heard during a dozen town hall meetings conducted by the commissioners: the impunity of the few and the inequality of the many before the law.
Let me just end with two quotes that best illustrate this sentiment. Witness number 132 of the victims of human rights indicated: “These wounds are not healed with the passage of time: they are healed by the application of justice.”
My second quote comes from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who stated in a different place with different problems: “Without justice, there can be no reconciliation. Without reconciliation, there can be no future.”
Thank you.
