LatAm's Top Human Rights Organization Is Broke - and It's Blaming the Region's Governments Gabriela Gorbea - VICE News
go to original May 27, 2016

The seven commissioners of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Juan Manuel Herrera/IACHR)

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has warned that it is in the middle of a "severe financial crisis" that will require drastic cuts, which will heavily impact its ability to attend to victims across the continent.

Commission officials blame the crisis on the reluctance of governments in the region to fund a body dedicated to probing the abuses they commit, or cover up. Some governments, meanwhile, claim that the Commission has lost backers because it has become too political.

The international body — set up by the Organization of American States in 1959 — released a statement earlier this week in which it said things are so bad that mass layoffs and cancelled visits are imminent and inevitable, unless member countries provide emergency donations.

In an editorial published in the Spanish newspaper El Pais this Monday, the commission's president, James Cavallaro, said the crisis was sparked by traditional European donors cutting back because of the influx of refugees from Syria and elsewhere.

This, he added, has laid bare the reluctance of Latin American governments to come up with the cash that the commission needs.

"Some countries feel uncomfortable when the Commission highlights the challenges the region faces in human rights," Cavallaro wrote. "They strangle us financially, perhaps in order to stop us fulfilling our mandate."

Such arguments have apparently done little to persuade the region's governments to respond positively to the Commission's appeal for money.

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