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June 23, 2005
Guest Column -- Armenia and Human Rights: A Test for the MCA
Posted by at 05:40 PM
We are delighted to post our very first guest column. The column provides MCA watchers an opportunity to share their opinions with the rest of us who follow this program. In Armenia and Human Rights: A Test for the MCA, Jennifer Windsor, Executive Director of Freedom House, discusses democracy and human rights standards in the MCA selection process.
Windsor writes:
The Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) process is designed to reward countries that make the "right choices" for their people, including meeting certain standards related to ruling justly. The democracy and human rights community to date has largely welcomed MCA decisions on country selection, as poor performing countries on democratic measures such as Vietnam and Mauritania were not selected.
However, the MCA has also selected several countries with a dubious commitment to human rights and democracy as being eligible to apply for MCA funds. Armenia is a striking example, and a test for the MCA. Among other key criteria, the MCA is supposed to reward countries that make sustained commitments to human rights, rule of law, and anti-corruption. On all of these counts, Armenia comes up short. Moreover, Armenia's leadership has been taking the country in precisely the wrong direction as the country has experienced significant democratic deterioration in recent years.
When the first MCA decisions were made in May 2004, democracy indicators had yet to be updated to reflect the impact of Armenia's flawed presidential and parliamentary elections in the fall of 2003. The regime has since responded to political unrest and demonstrations in the aftermath of these controversial elections through the use of force, the detention of opposition figures, as well as the harassment of journalists and human rights defenders considered to be sympathetic to the opposition's cause. Armenia's judiciary, which is plagued by corruption and is not independent of the executive branch, is not up to standard. These and other critical issues were highlighted in a detailed report on Armenia as part of Freedom House's Countries at a Crossroads governance survey released in 2004.
Just before Freedom House released its annual global freedom findings from Freedom in the World in mid-December 2004, (in which Armenia was downgraded in the political rights index), the MCA Board decided to recertify Armenia in November 2004. Since then, Freedom House has noted in its 2005 Annual Global Press Freedom survey the deterioration of press freedom in Armenia. And in a report released in June 2005 as part of Freedom House's Nations in Transit survey , further deterioration in the areas of judicial practice and media independence are evident.
A more vigorous discussion is needed on the inclusion of democracy and human rights standards in the MCA selection process. Giving these indispensable standards a back seat will hinder the overall potential of the MCA concept. To date, the MCA Board has not reached out for specialized briefings from groups like ours before taking decisions in order to ensure that they were aware of recent troubling trends which may not yet have been reflected in available indicators.
Of greater concern for the future success of the MCA is the seeming laxity of the Administration on the inclusion of poor democratic performers in the MCA process. Indeed, we can find no record of concern by the Administration about the political downturn in Armenia. It is imperative that senior U.S. Government decision makers communicate to the Armenian government the implications of that country's democratic deterioration and that such a downward trajectory places its continued participation in the MCA process in jeopardy. This dimension of the MCA process reveals a larger weakness in the current system. Namely, the MCA provides important potential leverage to encourage governments to make the right political choices, but only if the U.S. has a deliberate diplomatic strategy to raise issues of concern before and after decisions are made about MCA participation.
Armenia has not yet signed a compact with the MCC. To do so before concrete steps are taken to reverse the downward slide in political rights and civil liberties in that country would send an unfortunate signal: that the U.S. is willing to turn a blind eye to countries that are clearly not making the "right choices" for their own people.