Mary Robinson Ambassador of Conscience 2004

Mary Robinson, the first woman President of Ireland (1990-1997) and more recently United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002), has spent most of her life as a human rights advocate.

In 1997 Mary Robinson became the second United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights having served seven years as the first woman President of Ireland. As President of Ireland Mary Robinson stretched the boundaries of the Presidency to fit her concerns, one of the most prominent of which was human rights. She made trips to places like Somalia and Rwanda, and in the Great Lakes region of Africa she coined the memorable phrase, "the cycle of impunity," to describe the process by which leaving mass murder unpunished encouraged others to do the same.

Prior to her appointment as High Commissioner her name had actually been raised as a replacement for Boutros Boutros Ghali as Secretary General of the U.N., but although she was the right gender, Ireland was not in Africa, and that was where the consensus said that the next secretary general should come from. And when he did, Kofi Annan supported her for the human rights job. As High commissioner for Human Rights, she brought a sense of urgency and passion to the position, and the authority of a recently retired head of state.

Her determination and sense of urgency often irked U.N. bureaucrats who it seemed were very reluctant to upset governments no matter how appalling the given human rights situation. For Mary Robinson, human rights transcend and transcended national affiliations. For example, just because China was big, or Israel had friends in Washington, was no reason to stay silent. When she started as High Commissioner there was a widespread view, often repeated to her by leaders of developing countries:

"Don't you know human rights is just a Western stick to beat us with? It is politicized, nothing to do with real concern about human rights."

She accepted that there was an element of truth in what they were saying and so she set out to find the true agenda of human rights at the international level. She concluded that one needed

“to be strong in civil liberties, in the protection and promotion of civil and political rights, and strong in the protection and promotion of economic, social and cultural rights, and to fulfill the express vision and mandate of the establishment of the High Commissioner's office, which was to seek consensus on the right to development. That's an individual and a collective right, the right of the people to gain the full flower of their human rights.”

And that led her to seek more linkage between human rights and economic and social development. She helped leaders of developing countries to realize that “if you got your human rights right, you accelerated human development, economic development.” She sought to make human rights the ‘priority tool’ of developing countries in making progress. “To me it is a moral as well as a practical issue.”

Although emphasising the primacy of human rights she recognised the importance of human security, of coalitions against terrorism. But she spoke out clearly and courageously about the impact the ‘war on terror’ was having on human rights.

“If you believe as I do in the integrity of human rights, then they must be applied without fear or favor. And if that's my legacy, I'm happy about that, that can resonate on, and that's very encouraging for those who work on the coalface of human rights and risk their lives. The most I risked is being criticized in press or parliaments.”

Now based in New York, Mary Robinson is currently leading a new project, the Ethical Globalization Initiative (EGI). Its goal is to bring the norms and standards of human rights into the globalization process and to support capacity building in good governance in developing countries, with an initial focus on Africa.

Bill Shipsey
October 2004

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2005
U2

2004
Mary Robinson
Hilda MoralesTrujillo

2003
Václav Havel