The head of Nepal's UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHCR), Ian Martin, spoke to Nepali Times on how the UN can act beyond its fixed mandate towards the new political developments in Nepal.


MIN BAJRACHARYA

Nepali Times: The role of the UN seems to be more challenging now.
Ian Martin: There are clearly a number of areas that the UN could assist if asked to do so beyond our human rights mandate, humanitarian and development mandate but that is not so much for the UN to propose. That is up to the government and their negotiations with the Maoists what they are looking for. The assets we have got in the past year include effective engagement for Maoists at different levels and also include the security forces whom we criticised and we have a respectful relationship with both. The security forces are interested in the UN's opinion of them. The political parties have also appreciated our role in this movement as we visited most of them in detention. So I think we have opportunities through those relationships to play a constructive role in trying to make sure that tensions among them are kept under control.

Do you think that the ceasefire this time will last?
The main issue is that there should not just be a military ceasefire but that civilians have nothing to fear. There needs to be a clear discussion on what those modalities for the ceasefire are going to be, has to be properly negotiated and what kind of monitoring goes with whatever agreement is reached. The ceasefire has a military aspect and you have to be sure that the RNA and PLA are not going to attack each other. Once the ceasefire is agreed, the real risk is tensions among the different sectors of the population before there is an opportunity to establish strong democratic local government.

Transitional justice seems to be a buzzword today
Our presence has significant effect on the actors in terms of degree of deterrence in terms of committing violations but we haven't seen any satisfactory progress towards accountability in ensuring that those who committed abuses are effectively investigated and brought to justice.

There is clearly a strong demand in many sectors of the population, which is focusing initially on recent deaths and injuries but already people are looking beyond that to clarify the fate of long term disappeared and much broader question to impunity and responsibility for human rights abuses for many years. OCHCR is not about to tell Nepal what it should do in those areas, but what we can do is make international experience available so that political and civil society actors debating what they want to do can have access to our experience.

Maoist leaders have told us that they are open about a new national army and ready to join if its formed and that they trust only the UN to help in that.
El Salvador is one example where a part of the UN negotiated peace agreement was in rehabilitation of the guerrilals. There are two issues: one is downsizing of armed forces and a lot of places where the UN is involved in demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants and the separate issue is the establishment of a new security forces and what degree of vetting takes place to exclude those who are unsuitable as they have been responsible for human rights abuses. That is certainly the area of where the UN has expertise to offer.

Are you positive now that the human rights situation will improve?
Of course, there are opportunities now. When this office opened, we were here first to monitor violations of international humanitarian law of nearly 10-years of armed conflict. If we have not just a mutual ceasefire but lasting peace, then that part of agenda will have been addressed. But let us not be na?ve about how difficult this process is going to be. There is enormous amount of hard work  to institutionalise human rights.