Administrative Council of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights: 23rd Session
9 June 2007, Geneva

On Saturday 9 June 2007, ICTUR hosted its annual Administrative Council discussions in Geneva, Switzerland. The high profile annual event brings together trade unions, lawyers, academics and human rights organisations to make recommendations on strategies and action for ICTUR’s work on trade union rights in the the year ahead.

More than 40 delegates attended, including representatives of major international organisations ITUC, WFTU, OATUU, PSI and EI. Trade unions from Colombia, China, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Japan, New Zealand and Norway also participated in the meeting, together with lawyers from Colombia, Jordan, the UK and the USA, ICTUR correspondents from Iran and Sudan, and NGO representatives.

Interpretation was provided in English and Spanish.

The meeting was chaired by ICTUR Vice President Professor Keith Ewing and later by Steve Gibbons, a member of the ICTUR management committee.

ICTUR’s activities
ICTUR Vice President Fathi El-Fadl welcomed the Arabic language edition of ICTUR’s report on the TURC projects and commented that there was a need for more ICTUR publications in Arabic.

ICTUR Vice President Professor Keith Ewing suggested that the ICTUR world map should be distributed to schools around the world, putting an educational tool to promote awareness of labour rights into mainstream education.

The Council approved the report of Daniel Blackburn, Director of ICTUR (copies on request), and the proposals for future activities, which included extending the Trade Union Rights Centres project, and working to support the ITUC’s Forced Labour project (see below)

Lawyer and ICTUR project coordinator Miguel Puerto provided an update on ICTUR’s global project that is providing technical legal capacity to support trade union work in Colombia, Indonesia and Iraq. Mr Puerto emphasised the successful exchanges of ideas and information between the TURCs and took the opportunity to thank all project donors, including in particular the UNISON International Trade Union Development Fund, Amnesty International UK Section Charitable Trust, and LO Norway.

ICTUR Vice President Fathi El-Fadl explained that the TURCs have identified different needs and are focussing on different strategies for their operations. In Iraq there is a need for basic work to build networks and to promote awareness about trade union rights and the existence of international minimum labour standards.

Presentations and discussion: trade union rights worldwide
ICTUR Vice President Hassan Sunmonu, General Secretary of the African regional organisation OATUU, reported that trade union rights are violated all over Africa. The ILO, he said, had this year asked 48 African countries to report on actions to improve compliance with ILO standards.

Noting that ICTUR often involved lawyers from the Southern countries in its work, Mr Sunmonu emphasised the need for unions at national level to defend trade union rights. To accomplish this task, unions would need to demonstrate unity, strength and mobilisation capacity at national level, and international projects would need to recognise the importance of basic trade union infrastructure as well as specific project work.

Many of the problems could be attributed to a breakdown of social dialogue, as the kind of tripartite structures anticipated by ILO Convention 144 are very weak in Africa, a situation that is aggravated by the lack of union capacity when they enter negotiations with employers. Mr Sunmonu added that the African Union Labour and Social Affairs Committee had recently identified the need for training and support for labour inspectors, and for this to be a key area for ILO participation.

Mr Sunmonu noted the role of the trade unions in advocating social and economic rights in Guinea, and expressed his keen interest in situations where trade unions incorporated a struggle for broader human rights into their work. Corruption in Ministries, he argued, may not be a straight-forward labour rights issue, but it had been one cause of late and unpaid wages in Africa, indicating the importance of recognition within unions of the close relationship between achivement of broader social and economic rights and progress in labour rights.

Jeroen Beirnaert, from the Department of Human and Trade Union Rights at the international trade union confederation ITUC, introduced a new project concerned with the eradication of forced labour around the world. He expressed a keen desire to harness the power of unions as an instrument to raise awareness of this issue and to work actively in the development and implementation of the project . Not a single country is unconnected with forced labour.

Mr Beirnaert set out three aspects of forced labour - bonded labour; trafficking for exploitation; and child labour - and noted also that slavery continues to exist in some African countries.

At the international level, trade unions are already actively involved in the case of Burma (Myanmar), which is the best known and most serious case, but he also cited the trade union campaign to raise awareness of forced prostitution during the football World Cup in Germany. In relation to problems of trafficking, Mr Beirnaert believed that agreements such as that between IUF affiliated unions (union membership transferred between IUF affiliated unions in different countries at no cost and with no administrative burden when a member migrates) had an important role to play.

The international trade union strategy should be based on input from local unions and experts around the world, and to this end it would be helpful to engage with ICTUR’s networks to gather ideas. The ICTUR world map on forced labour, he said, was an excellent starting point for raising awareness of the problems.

Luciano Sanin, Director of the national trade union school of Colombia ENS, reported on the horrific situation facing trade unionists in his country. Mr Sanin began his presentation with an analysis of how the trade union movement in Colombia has been decimated by the violence, reducing to less than half its former size over 30 years, and with only one in a hundred workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement. Account needed to be taken of the high level of unemployment in Colombia. The Colombian authorities contributed to the problem by placing technical legal and administrative obstacles in the path of trade unions: more than half of the trade unions formed last year had been prevented from registering.

These days trade union capacity is paralysed – so violently have strikes been repressed in the past and so high the number of dismissed strikers, that the ability to strike, which Mr Sanin reminded the ICTUR Council was essential to support the capacity to bargain effectively, was damaged. He described the violence against Colombian trade unionists as ‘systematic’ and ‘structural’, emphasising that trade unionists were in no way victims of the internal conflict but rather victims of specifically targeted anti-union violence, often during negotiations. Whole cities, he added, have been de-unionised by the armed groups.

Despite the efforts to raise awareness of the situation in Colombia, Mr Sanin believed that the murders of trade union leaders lacked visibility, saying that the world was ‘almost unaware’. A new report published by ENS ‘2515’ was now available to provide detailed analysis of where, why, how and when trade unionists had been killed.

Hassan Sunmonu asked what action was needed from the ILO. Mr Sanin replied that it was necessary to pursue all of the options available, but added that the UN human rights presence in Colombia has some impact, and that the anticipated ILO presence should also help.

Daniel Retureau of the French CGT noted that the ILO was the most developed supervisory system, but that we should not put too much confidence in its mechanisms as the solution to all of these problems. There is a need to work with the UN as well, but solidarity is human not institutional. Links between people can lead to pressure on governments to change. We could seek an EU or parliamentary inquiry.

Christine Parker of LO-Norway said that European Governments could be persuaded to adopt helpful positions on Colombia if we can ensure that they have the information. Unions need to make sure that they produce reliable information about the trade union situation in Colombia in English.

Jamshid Ettehadieh, ICTUR’s correspondent on Iran, opened his presentation by referring to hundreds of thousands of cases of workers in Iran who are not being paid on time, whose wages are delayed, and whose contracts have been terminated without cause. Fixed term contracts are being imposed. Trade unionists are being arrested, tortured and sacked from their jobs. Their families have even been dragged from their homes during the arrests.

Mr Ettehadieh said it was useful to understand the four recent phases of development of the trade union situation in Iran:
- during the Iran/Iraq war when a labour law with some limited rights was developed, although it could not be used effectively because strikes were seen as treason during the war;
- 1988 – 1997 was a period of opening up of the economy. IMF and World Bank policies decimated the economy producing massive closures of industry and job losses. In this period the regime accepted the establishment of tripartite Islamic Labour Councils, which were at this time close to the government;
- Between 1997 and 2004 the Khatemi period was one of contradictory reform. On the one hand there was an opening of the political climate which gave some space in which trade unions were able to increase their activities, but at the same time the supreme religious leader, above the government, maintained significant control.
- In the most recent period the regime is stopping all independent activity. There is now unprecedented pressure on the nine independent trade unions that are in operation, including the arrest of 1200 members of the Tehran bus drivers’ trade union and the sentencing of their leader to a prison term of five years. Non-payment of wages is a serious problem, as is affordability of basic goods. The current government has no sympathy with trade union ideas at all.

Hassan Sunmonu asked about the condition of the Islamic Labour Councils in the current period. Mr Ettehadieh explained that they had seen their activities restricted because they were seen as close to the previous regime. He added that the problem with the Labour Councils was an institutional or structural issue: that as tripartite institutions they simply could not perform an independent trade union role.