There is praise and criticism for the former president Mrs Robinson in relation to her first year as UN Commissioner for Human Rights in a report released in Washington yesterday.
The world report by Human Rights Watch criticises the British government for its "disappointing" implementation of the human rights provisions in the Belfast Agreement. The report says "the UK Government consistently failed to translate the provisions into practical and effective human rights protections".
Human Rights Watch is the most important human rights monitoring body in the world. It is a privately-funded non-governmental organisation based in New York, with full-time offices in several cities around the world.
The introduction to the 506page report covering 68 countries says Mrs Robinson "took great strides towards reinvigorating an office that had retreated into the irrelevance of quiet diplomacy under its first occupant". She was "at her best on Algeria, Rwanda and Colombia", it says.
It adds: "She also issued useful protests on Burma, the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, Kosovo, Mexico, Nigeria and Sierra Leone."
But the report also says: "Much work remains to transform the High Commissioner's office into an effective vehicle for defending human rights. She has built a strong staff at UN headquarters in New York but has yet to make her presence felt in debates of relevance to human rights protection at the Security Council or in the Secretariat."
The report goes on to say: "Her frequent rhetorical references to the right to development, while perhaps useful for building broader support for her office, remained conceptually hazy."
The passage dealing with Mrs Robinson concludes: "She rarely offered country-specific suggestions about how to improve respect for economic, social, and cultural rights, let alone concrete illustrations of the interdependence of those rights and civil and political rights. She thus failed to transform this idea into a concept of programmatic significance."
Mr Jose Diaz, spokesman in Geneva for the High Commission, told The Irish Times that this last criticism was "a bit unfair" in view of Mrs Robinson's efforts in pushing development rights. As regards the Security Council, "they are still very wary of addressing issues from the angle of human rights and it is going to take a long time before they take that dimension into account explicitly," Mr Diaz said.
In the section on Northern Ireland, the report is critical of the British government's efforts to set up the human rights commission provided for in the Belfast Agreement. "Unfortunately, the draft legislation establishing the commission fell far short of ensuring that it is an effective institutional mechanism for the protection of human rights."
The report notes that Mrs Robinson wrote to the British government "urging it to provide the commission with the necessary investigatory powers". A British embassy official said yesterday improvements had been made to the legislation to provide for investigatory powers.
On reform of the RUC, the report says that "deep concern" has emerged that the Patten commission will "focus solely on the managerial dimensions of `downsizing' and `diversifying' the force" instead of "emphasising accountability for human rights violations by the RUC and the creation of effective accountability mechanisms for the future".
The report also criticises the RUC for its use of plastic bullets during the Drumcree standoff last July. "The high number of head and upper body injuries indicated that plastic bullets were fired in violation of RUC guidelines that require officers to target people below the waist."