Human Rights Defenders
One Voice One People

OVOP's Objectives:
First put some honesty into human rights legislation

Let us investigate the most asked question: "What are human rights? Are these rights legally binding?" "The language of the Universal Declaration and the two Covenants has the force of treaty law and directly empowers people. It tells people at the grass-roots level that they have rights - rights to security, dignity, economic opportunity and a better life for their children - not any vague and undefined entitlement to a favour of some kind, bestowed by a Government or an international agency. " (Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Romanes Lecture 1997, Oxford University, 11 November 1997)

So much for theory - What about the practice ?
Those people at the grass-roots level feel powerless to do anything about human rights. They can just have their lives and property destroyed while having no choice but to suffer in silence. In many nations the few that speak up publicly are likely to end up in prison or worse. In some more advanced nations that would see themselves as very democratic people may still find themselves bankrupted and/or made unemployable for various reasons that have nothing in common with natural justice or reason. Around the world to even question the arbitrary actions of authority is to invite further injustice.

The problem is that when it actually comes to the application of human rights principles diplomacy and greed always seems to win out over reality and honesty.

The grass-roots view is that truth is always the loser while politicians and legal experts present appeasement as the only practical path. But history shows that appeasement not only fails to work, it also allows a drift to even more frequent incidents of human rights abuse as politically-correct-speak replaces honest statement and the boundaries of what is acceptable become ever more blurred. Thus mass murder on a grand scale becomes "the peace process" or "ethnic cleansing" in the world's mass media.

The people of the world know this full well - but their leaders and media controllers will never admit (in public) the extent of the problem, for that would be undiplomatic!

But perhaps the people of the world, if they act in concert to expose 'human rights industry' scams, can force a transition to a more honest era ? With the advent of the Internet for the first time a large number of ordinary people (still at the moment only a minority - but a growing minority) can talk to each other and come up with ways of exposing the scams.


A Three Path Programme
First it is essential that those people who have suffered human rights abuse or know others who have been so abused are enabled to express their dissatisfaction with the current sorry state of affairs - where today's signed human rights documents are not real undertakings by governments but only public relations exercises without any real substance. This is the essence of the OVOP Manifesto. We ask you to consider taking part on a long term people's petition to the UN that asks the UN to keep its human rights efforts honest. Currently some nations are stopping this happening and a way has to be found to expose this. It is our hope that the media interest in a very large number of letters to the UN can assist in this (rather like the efforts underway by other human rights organisations in writing letters to nations who inflict human rights abuse on individuals about the specific abuse cases). We ask you to download the rich text file alldocs.rtf and send the Manifesto to the UN and a confirmation letter to us, with your ideas on how the UN could be more able in defending human rights.


Second it is vital that as many as possible human rights abuse victims be enabled to complain effectively to the bodies that claim that they exist to honestly listen. Experience shows that lawyers alone cannot be trusted to do such work. Rather victims must help victims. This is the essence of OVOP's ongoing casekit project.


Third a need exists to put some numbers on the abuse and in particular on the sources of abuse. Just how do the various government rate ? - not on empty words - but on actual outcomes and on structure. In reality human rights abuse does not just happen out of the blue. Rather the pointers and warning signs are there for all to see BUT billions of dollars worth of 'statesmanship' and diplomacy is being used to confuse the public and cover up the truth. The result is the biggest rip-off of all as your taxation ends up buying not happiness, security, and plenty, but rather death, abuse, and deprivation. Exposing where the real balance sheet on human rights stands is what OVOP's REALity rating system is about.