Introduction

National human rights institutions around the world strive for accessibility, including for those living in rural and remote areas. Some open branch offices in the regions, to bring their services closer to the people. Others develop voluntary networks of individuals who, while not able to formally represent the institution, can provide a local focal point for human rights. Both these approaches have their advantages and their drawbacks. The issue is most acute in Mongolia with a small population distributed widely over a large country. This paper looks at some options for making the services provided by the National Human Rights Commission of Mongolia (“NHRCM”) available to those in distant aimags and soums.

The Problem

Mongolia is three times the size of France. Nearly three quarters of the population lives outside Ulaanbaatar, nearly half of them in rural areas. Poverty is still on the rise 12 years after the shock therapy of transition to market forces began, and is especially prevalent in rural areas. Economic rights especially are under great threat in the regions and about a third of all Mongolians live in poverty. Transport infrastructure is under-developed and air travel difficult even at the best of times for the few who can afford it. Postal services and telecommunications are not always reliable, even for those communities where they are available.

The NHRCM has been established to promote and protect the human rights of everyone in Mongolia. It has to ensure that its three main functions work for those in remote areas as well as those residing in Ulaanbaatar. It must be able to receive and process complaints from everyone, no matter where they live; it must educate the public and officials about human rights and responsibilities across the country; and it must ensure that its human rights policy advice and research is relevant for everybody throughout Mongolia. Realistically it cannot do this effectively if its personnel and services are located only in Ulaanbaatar. Travel outside the capital city is expensive and time-consuming and not cost-effective for a servicing a sparse population.

Accessibility could be improved somewhat by opening branch offices in the larger regional cities. This would improve accessibility for those people living in that city and the surrounding aimag, though this would still be a relatively small percentage of the population. The infrastructure of a branch office would be expensive to establish for a limited increase in overall accessibility.

United Nations Volunteers

Under the HuristMON, project which is designed to create broader public awareness of human rights and to strengthen observance of human rights nationally, a total of 25 United Nations Volunteers (UNVs) have been employed at an annual cost (salaries, expenses and overheads) of about USD 50,000. Since the project was designed some changes have been made by the UN and during 2002, this cost will be shared with the project developing the capacity of the NHRCM. The volunteers are being trained by the UN projects to become a local human rights focal point for their aimags. Many aimags are also establishing some human rights infrastructure as part of their local human rights action plans. At present the UNVs are brought to Ulaanbaatar from time to time (and at considerable expense for further training.

At USD 1500 pa the UNVs are paid well above local salary rates which could be as little as a quarter of this. Other costs of the UNV network amount to about $15,000 annually across the 21 aimags.

The HuristMON project is due to end in mid 2003 and it is apparently proposed that the cost of sustaining the UNVs will shift completely to the project supporting the NHRCM. At USD 50,000 pa, this amounts to 20% of the costs of that project over the first two years. This component of the project was not in the original design and is not in the amended project signed in December 2001. One has to question, no matter how useful to the NHRCM they can be, whether supporting the UNVs is the best use of NHRCM capacity development money.

That said, the network of local representatives is a palpable resource for the NHRCM. So much so that the Commission has drafted some work rules for local representatives. Their proposed role is to help the Commission by “conducting local research on the implementation of human rights…” They are to conduct human rights training on their own initiative or as directed by the NHRCM, establish local databases on human rights violations and make these available to the (Commission’s) network. The Commission also envisages that the local representatives will receive “some” complaints and “advise and assist” complainants and refer others to the Commission.

National and Local Human Rights Action Plans

These plans are in preparation. The National Plan is due to be presented to Parliament for endorsement in the current Parliament session (ending June 2002). It is expected to contain mechanisms for the NHRCM to have a monitoring and evaluation role and, having been closely involved in the Baseline Study on which the National Human Rights Action Plan is based, the Commission is well-placed to undertake this role and expecting to do so. It is important that the NHRAP recognises the ongoing costs involved in its implementation, including monitoring and evaluation.

As well as a national Plan, it is also expected that each aimag will have a local human rights action plan. These too will have cost implications for aimags, including allocation of resources, including staff that may need to be employed in the implementation of the plan. Further, like the NHRAP, the local plans should include monitoring and evaluation arrangements, presumably at some costs to the local administrations. Doubtless this will not be great as the local administrations generally have extremely limited resources and some are very small themselves. Nonetheless it seems that they should be obliged under the plans to set aside some resources for human rights activities. Some already contribute to the work of the UNVs by making premises available for them to function from, and some are setting up ex-officio boards with a human rights focus

Non-Governmental Organisations

A further ingredient to the human rights environment in the countryside is the activities of NGOs. There has been a burgeoning in the numbers of human rights NGOs in Mongolia since 1990. While many are now inactive there are several, for example the Mongolian Women Lawyers’ Association which has something like 800 members, the Liberal Women’s Brain Pool and the Women for Social Progress, that have extensive networks in the countryside. Some NGOs are sustained by aid money, which may affect their sustainability in the long term, but nonetheless they represent a considerable human rights resource throughout the country. The Commission is in the process of developing its relationships with the NGO community and has established an ex-officio board on which a number of key NGOs are represented.

Options

It seems possible that these ingredients – the UNVs, the national and local human rights action plans, local administrations and NGOs – may be able to provide the ingredients for a solution to the ongoing problem the Commission is facing in making its services accessible in the countryside.

It is highly unlikely that if the Ikh Khural approves the National Human Rights Action Plan it will give the Commission enough resources to take over full responsibility for employing and resourcing the UNVs. But it may make some provision. Since the two UN projects are meeting the costs of the UNVs in the 2002 year, the state contribution need not begin until the next financial year anyway. Even then, the state cannot be expected immediately to meet the full annual cost. Provided the UN projects can be persuaded to find the resources to continue funding for the next few years, it should be possible to phase in the state budget contribution over, say, four years. Thus only 25% of the total cost would be required to be found by the state for the year 2002.

Also, the local administration could be approached for a contribution such as providing (or continuing to provide where they are already doing this) premises and other overheads. Discussions could be held with NGOs to determine how they might contribute to the sustainability of the local representatives, perhaps, where possible, employing the UNV as their local representative on a part-time basis. The administrations of more than one aimag could decide to combine to support one local representative between them. There are many different possibilities.

Next Steps

Some more detailed costings need to be done. The ideas being floated in this paper could be discussed at the forthcoming First National Human Rights NGOs Forum at the end of April. The issue of an increase in the budget of the Commission to enable it to phase in its support of local representatives in all aimags needs to be raised with the Government, particularly the Finance Ministry and with the Parliament. Visits from international human rights people could be used to pursue the issue with the authorities, which will involve these visitors being well breached.

The issues are complex and relatively expensive and will not be straightforward to resolve. Nonetheless given goodwill all round and some determination it should be possible to find an efficient and effective solution.

Peter Hosking
Ulaanbaatar
March 2002