Cuba Rejects "Biased" Human Rights Recommendations

The Cuban government has dismissed what it claims are “politically biased” recommendations on the human rights situation following a United Nations review.

Although it committed to responding to nearly 300 suggestions made by the working group of the UN’s Universal Periodic Review, UPR, Cuba made clear that it had already rejected part of the report.

“A minority of recommendations are unacceptable for Cuba,” a government press release said. “These are the ones that are politically biased and founded on imprecise premises, due to attempts to discredit our country.”

The UPR is a mechanism of the Human Rights Council under which all member states are reviewed every four-and-a-half years. Non-binding recommendations are then issued on how to improve their human rights record before the next review. (See Cuba Goes Before UN Rights Body.)

Following its first UPR in February 2009, Cuba accepted 60 out of the 89 recommendations in the report. But according to Amnesty International, there has been little progress since that review.

“In fact, during this period, repression of the peaceful exercise of civil and political rights has increased,” the organisation noted in a February 2013 report. “Independent journalists, human rights activists and political opponents have often been harassed by state security services, and some have been detained and sentenced. Moreover, there has been a steady increase in the number of arbitrary detentions since 2009.”

Politically motivated arrests in Cuba are reported every month by Hablemos Press Information Centre, run by the journalist Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez, and by the dissident Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, headed by Elizardo Sánchez, which recorded over 6,000 political arrests in 2012 (See Political Detentions Treble in Last Three Years.)

According to a report by the US State Department in mid-April, Cuba had a record number of “short-term politically motivated and, on occasion, violent detentions during 2012”.

But in its submission to the UPR working group, the Cuban government denied the practice of arbitrary detention or torture.

“The detentions were carried out according to criminal procedures and according to crimes as categorised in the criminal law,” their submission read.

The 292 recommendations of the 2013 UPR included calls for Cuba to ratify and implement international human rights treaties.

Latin American states and Spain took various positions in their contributions to the UPR. Mexico encouraged Cuba to approve a visit by the UN special rapporteur on torture, and Spain added to this request the recommendation that Cuba extend an “open and permanent invitation” to the official. Panama recommended persisting with the development of an institutional framework for upholding human rights. Chile reiterated its concerns on freedom of expression.

By contrast, Nicaragua urged Cuba to carry on guaranteeing economic, cultural and social rights to its citizens. It took a similar position in 2009.

Cuba must now provide its responses by September, when the Human Rights Council meets in session.

Yaremis Flores Marin is an independent lawyer and citizen journalist in Cuba.

This story was first published on IWPR’s website.