“The Hemispheric Role of the OAS
in Pursuing Democratic Citizenship
in the Context of the Summit of the Americas”

January 22nd, 2009
Organization of American States
Washington, DC

I – Welcome and OAS Building Tour

• Aline Hommes, Specialist, Department of International Affairs – Secretariat for External Relations, Organization of American States

II – Introduction of Panelists

• Aline Hommes, Specialist, Department of International Affairs – Secretariat for External Relations, Organization of American States

III – Speaker Remarks

• Jane Thery, Head of OAS-USA Relations, Organization of American States

The principal focus areas of the OAS are: multidimensional security, integral development, political affairs and democracy, and human rights. The OAS is composed of representatives from all of the member states, that make up the board of directors, and a technical staff to help facilitate and carry out the resolutions and mandates that are generated in the General Assembly and the Summits of the Americas. The technical secretariat is about 600-700 people, although it was much larger in the past. Every year, in the first few weeks of June, the OAS holds a general assembly of foreign ministers, which always takes place in one of the member states. This year it will be in Honduras. The General Assembly produces an annual report on the progress of the OAS and creates the mandates for the next year.

The technical secretariat helps to identify new issue areas, and what role there might be for the OAS. The organization brings together experts to provide the latest analysis on developing issues and the ambassadors may then choose to put forward a resolution to address them. Sometimes the resolutions are supportive of the work of other states or international organizations, and other times they call for the OAS to work on the issues directly and set up some Inter-American instrument to achieve that purpose. In the second case the OAS will begin to facilitate the process of joint negotiations, such as in the case of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. This instrument outlined the shared vision of the member states on democracy and set up a process for addressing threats to democracy in the hemisphere. The result is that most of the work of the Secretariat for Political Affairs in supporting democracy is guided by the Inter-American Democratic Charter.

In the realm of integral development, which has been evolving very rapidly to include a very broad range of issues, the OAS is seeking to provide small grants to innovative projects as well as provide space for ministerial meetings that address the relevant sectors. All of the ministerial meetings, which are about every two years, are then supposed to feed into the summit process. Such that if the Education ministers meet and decide on certain common issues of interest, then that can be fed into a Summit declaration that the Presidents can then support.

The Human Rights area is unique in that individual citizens can appeal their case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Therefore, the Commission needs to be semi-autonomous in order to insure that country’s can be critical of themselves when they make mistakes or have internal problems. The Commission also has special rapporteurs for freedom of expression, for indigenous people, for handicapped, etc. that are supposed to do regular reports about the member states on these issues.

Questions and discussions with the audience included conversation about: the number of member state signatories to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; the changing role of multilateral institutions in world affairs; the connections and need for increased joint strategic planning between the OAS, IADB, World Bank and IMF; the effects and changes in OAS-civil society engagement over the past ten years; what the OAS has done to preserve the legal space for civil society activity in member states; the existence and activity of health and medically focused civil society organizations, and their relationship to the Pan-American Health Organization; the role of the private (business) sector in civil society funding and activities as they relate to the OAS.

IV – Speaker Remarks

• Pablo Zúñiga, Director, Department for State Modernization and Governance,
  Secretariat for Political Affairs Director, Organization of American States

The OAS is a multilateral organization made up of the executive branches of member state governments. Therefore, the strength of the OAS is its technical expertise in these multilateral affairs and negotiations, and its weakness is that it depends on the invitations and mandates of the executive branches of its member states to take action on issues. Our strength is when the OAS can serve to get the member states to agree on an issue by consensus then it creates a big door of opportunity that you can drive things through. However, this can be a limiting factor when you talk about civil society.

When we talk about ourselves as the OAS we are really talking about the General Secretariat, the executing organ of the OAS. The OAS is really the General Assembly, the consensus of the governments. If utilized well the OAS can be a very strong instrument for countries large and small.

The year 1991 is an important date because it was at the General Assembly of Santiago Chile that marked the first moment of hemispheric consensus with regards to democracy. All of the governments agreed about the need to promote democracy, and that the people have some type of right to democracy. At that point the OAS did not have any capacity to strengthen democracy, so they created a unit within the General Secretariat to focus on strengthening democracy. The main focus then was institutions of democracy, mostly elections.

Ten years later many countries became disappointed that the OAS Resolution 1080, which had come out of the Santiago General Assembly (1991), because it was a responsive but not proactive tool to address any rupture in a legitimate constitutional process of a member state. It was used to defend democracy when it was in peril, such as the 1991 coup in Haiti, when the resolution was used to convene the ministers of foreign affairs to address that situation. However, it was not able to promote and strengthen democracy. So many of the governments began discussing the development of a pro-active tool.

What came out of that was the Inter-American Democratic Charter. As a document it gives us a snapshot of what constitutes democracy, and it provides an integral approach. It says that the people of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote it and defend it. The Charter has a huge power as a normative instrument that can change behavior. In the past OAS democracy promotion has been limited by the principle of non-intervention into the internal ongoings of a state. The OAS is not an NGO nor is it a supranational body, it is simply a conglomeration of the governments of the hemisphere, who have come together to strengthen their own common good.

The Democratic Charter states that human rights are an element of democracy, and that development and the fight against poverty are also elements of democracy. It also continues the elements of Resolution 1080, so it does have a means to protect and defend democracy where it is in danger of being interrupted. It also talks about promoting a democratic culture. So it comes to view democracy as not just institutions and norms, but as a way of life and a construct of values and principles. In this way it promotes a civic morality associated with democratic values like tolerance, participation, respect, anti-discrimination.

For civil society Articles 1 and 6 reference the importance of active citizen participation that is ethical and responsible. So the charter gives governments an obligation to involve civil society, to involve their people in the democratic process. It ties democracy directly to the protection of human rights, to the need for transparency in government action. It speaks to the importance of democratic political parties and political organizations, as well as the equal participation of women in politics. Other issues such as human development, quality education and the respect for the environment are also included as elements of democracy. Which means that civil society and citizens can use this Charter to hold governments accountable.

At present the Secretariat of Political Affairs is aware that we have never had as much institutional democracy, elections, and a commitment to it. At the same time we have never had more inequality in the region. The situation is that the governments of Latin America have not been able to deliver the public goods, they have not been able to create a citizenship that is more complete. There have been advances in the realm of political citizenship, such as enhanced rights to suffrage, increased electoral transparency, strengthened institutions and political parties. The human rights system has been geared towards strengthening a civil citizenship, with the rights and responsibilities. However, citizenship is more than that. There is also a social-economic citizenship that has a right to education and to employment as well as to the expectation of good governance, and the governments have a right to look out for this.

That is where we are right now, that the General Secretariat is working toward right now. Our areas of work have been and continue to be: election monitoring and reform of electoral institutions; strengthening the representative systems such as the congresses and parliaments, issues of de-centralization and strengthening local government; and, issues of values and practices of conflict resolution and promoting a culture of peace and dialogue. We have also strengthened the OAS’s analytical capacity, to look at the hot spots to advise the Secretary General so that he can use his resources when requested to mediate and to work on politically delicate issues.

The Department of State Modernization and Governance focuses on strengthening the state’s capacity to deliver on the types of citizenship that I have described. We also do institution building in the area of legislative technical assistance, through forums with presidents of legislatures and congresses. We support FOPREL (Foro de los Presidentes de Poderes Legislativos de Centroamérica y la Cuenca del Caribe), and help train the presidents of the legislatures or their commissions on issues of the Inter-American system. We also provide individual assistance to legislatures who are seeking to modernize with new technologies and who want to establish units to respond to citizens and civil society organizations. We have also worked with the Red Interamericana sobre Descentralización, which has worked to convene ministers and high officials responsible for policies of decentralization, local governance and citizen participation. We also do studies and research on topics such as the impact of decentralization.

One of our new areas of work is in transparency of governance, which is based on the Inter-American Convention against corruption. We are just about to launch a webpage that will be a guidebook on transparency and integrity, which will show everything that the governments in the Andean Region and Chile are doing to promote transparency. We are designing an online training course to help directors of government agencies to be more transparent. There is also a section on the training of public officials and young leaders on how they can be agents of democratic change in their professional lives and perform public service with a democratic culture. The most recent area that we started working on is a special focus on the English speaking Caribbean.

One of my passions is education for democracy. We have worked together with our OAS Department of Education to establish an Inter-American Program on Education for Democratic Values and Practices. The program is an alliance of all civil society organizations that promote democracy through formal and non-formal education.

Questions and discussions with the audience included conversation about: how the General Secretariat can strengthen the capacity of the member states by involving civil society; the impact of Canada’s entrance into the OAS on the issue of democracy; active and passive transparency; and, pedagogy of democracy.

V – Speaker Remarks

• David Morris, Director of the Summits of the Americas Secretariat, Organization of American States

The OAS has gone through a modernization process and continues to go through it today. This is because the 14 year old process of the Summits of the Americas and the considerable growth of the Inter-American system over those years have led to the development of a mechanism which we call the Joint Summits Working Group. It is composed of 12 Inter-American institutions working collaboratively in coordination on the conduct of each of their respective roles vis-à-vis the Summits. This grew out of a 2001 agreement at the Quebec Summit, which established the Joint Summit Working Group between the OAS, ECLA, IADB, and PAHO. It has since expanded to include the World Bank, all of the regional financial institutions, plus international migration and labor organizations, and the Institute for Productivity in the Americas. The growth in membership is a reflection of an increased need for institutional coordination, and a need for clarity of the mandates, rules and responsibilities. In this way it is analogous to the process of modernization that our member states have been going through, except at the hemispheric level.

We need that kind of clarity in the Summits process. What is the role of the General Secretariat? What is the role of the National Secretariat? In this current summit process the National Secretariat is in Trinidad and Tobago. The host government has a responsibility in the preparation stage of the summit process. However, one of the things that we have begun to hear increasingly is a need to reflect on what the summits have accomplished over the past 14 years, and what is the challenge and responsibility of the OAS as a multilateral institution to incorporate the summit dynamic as an ultimate programming compass. Secretary General Insulza has said that this is what he wishes his legacy to be.

There has been a lot of criticism, disappointment and failure of some of the summits to perform. We need to bring summitry into the rubric of being results based and focused on real commitments, and not just a forum for making platitudinal statements. There have been 1026 paragraphs of consensus language negotiated in the past 14 years of the summits. The language negotiated in Mar del Plata (2005) were not signed by hemispheric leaders, which said something about the bilateral tensions, sub-regional blockings and concerns over issues of trade that existed at that moment in history.

If we look back at the summit process there has been tremendous engagement of civil society. We have increased this in the past year and a half in preparation for the upcoming summit. We conducted a hemispheric forum here last March, we followed that with a hemispheric forum specifically for the summit process in May held in Miami, and we have since then followed that with civil society consultations for the English speaking Caribbean in Trinidad and Tobago in October, and one for Central America, Mexico and the Dominican Republic that was held in El Salvador last month. And we are now planning a civil society consultation for South America in Peru in February. This will be followed by another Hemispheric forum here in DC in March. More information is available on our website. Finally we will hold another civil society forum just prior to the summit in Trinidad and Tobago.

If we look back at Mar del Plata, Nuevo León, Quebec, Santiago and Miami, there wasn’t yet that institutionalized engagement and consultation of civil society. There were a lot of protests, there was a lot of expressions of concern, and there were a lot of demonstrations, but it wasn’t institutionalized with the same degree of rigor and the same dedication of OAS resources to ensure that the process is engaging, is disciplined, is structured to enable the voices from the sides to be heard.

In addition to that, this year we launched the Summits of the Americas Virtual Platform. That is an online consultative process open to the public, and focuses mostly on the themes of the summit declarations. So we have had discussions on human prosperity, energy security. We are launching a discussion on gender equality, another on public security and democratic governance, as well as another on private sector engagement.

We have also had an increase in expressions of interest for engagement by the private sector. Looking to develop pubic-private partnerships, and the conduct of a private sector forum just prior to the summits themselves. In the lead up to April 17th to 19th in Port of Spain, there will be in the three or four days preceding: a civil society forum jointly organized by the National Secretariat and our office; a private sector forum which is being jointly organized by the Private Sector of the Americas and the OAS department of Trade and Tourism; an indigenous forum being sponsored by the Canadian government in partnership with the Assembly of First Nations and the Association of Women of Canada; a consultation of labor movements with COSATI which is a labor union that works closely with the Inter-American Ministerial on Labor and the recently established Confederación de Sindicalistas de las Americas in conjunction with the OAS Department of Social Development and Labor; a youth forum being organized jointly by the Young Americas Business Trust with the OAS department of Trade and Tourism. The Trust for the Americas will be engaging the private sector through a gala dinner on the eve of the summit to mobilize private sector resources to expand their program to offer training in information and communications technology through out the Caribbean for youth at risk. This is an effort to deal with unemployment problems, and crime and security problems. There will also be a sub-regional forum for people who are Afro-descendants, held by Global Rights, the Summits of the Americas Secretariat with the support of the Inter-American Foundation. Finally we are also planning a forum for people with disabilities.

We work with all of these groups in addition to the main thrust of our work in supporting the National Secretariat and the Planning and Implementation Review Group process, and supporting member states in their access to information about the summits and their events. We also provide support in the process of getting the declarations ready and the preparatory process. Therefore, for us the Summits are very much a process and not just an event. They culminate in an event, which will then launch the next series of activities for its implementation.

A big emphasis of the host government this year is that we have to move out of the rhetoric of the last fourteen years and into a commitment and results. We have yet to see what implications this will have in terms of the declarations, the commitments of member state resources and what impact it will have on the OAS General Secretariat. In the past when people were negotiating declarations they never defined what is a mandate. To me a mandate should be a commitment by leaders for actions that need to be taken by their own governments, because the primary responsibility for the summit implementation rests in the hands of the member states, since they are the owners of the process. As members of civil society you have an opportunity and a responsibility to hold your governments and elected officials accountable to these mandates.

Ideally when I talk about the modernization of the summit process what we would like to work towards is the summit being on a regular basis, possibly every three years, or every two years in substitute for the General Assembly. If the summits are going to be institutionalized as the ultimate governing body of the OAS, this does not need to change the constitution of the OAS, it would just mean that every second or third year the summit would replace the General Assembly. During these General Assemblies foreign ministers would attend because they are the board of governors of the OAS, but additionally they would happen to be attended by their presidents and finance ministers as well. This would be a tremendous affirmation of the importance of the summits in the context of the OAS by all member states and the General Secretariat if we were to achieve that.

Another interesting idea would be for every two or three years that the summits to be a substitute for the general assembly and that we would coordinate it such that the annual meeting of the IADB would take place either directly before of immediately after in the same venue. This would be impressive since the IADB is the single largest provider of finance capital to the Americas. Up to now the IADB has not yet aligned its lending priorities or its country program strategies with the mandates established at the summits, nor has there been an inter-agency alignment. The OAS as a political driver of commitments and the IADB as a financial driver of commitments need to be synchronized.

I think that we are at a watershed mark where this summit can demonstrate that institutionalized capacity to start getting the necessary resources into the OAS, and get resource allocation aligned with member state commitments. It must have an implementation plan that can incorporate a monitoring and evaluation mechanism that can be agreed upon by member states. This way we can get consistent tracking where member states can bring back their own reports of progress, and at the same time their own requests for help. After all the General Secretariat is at the service of member states, we do not set the agenda, we respond to the needs of member states in the best way that we can. I think that we are on the right track.

Questions and discussions with the audience included conversation about: whether the summits have ever addressed the issues of the legal environments for civil society organizations; role of citizens in supporting and sustaining democracy; need to get civil society voices heard by member states before the summits to insure representative process; national consultations and citizen participation; what is the next step of what is minimally acceptable in terms of citizen engagement in their own government; and the possibility of splitting the Summit Implementation and Review Group into two committees one dealing with implementation and another for planning.