Annual report 2003

The OMCT received the “Foundation for Geneva” award in 2003, allowing the opportunity for its president to reflect on the main areas of action of the moment:
“Two themes particularly receive OMCT’s attention today. Firstly, human rights defenders. Those who fight to alert the international community on grave violations of fundamental rights increasingly become the targets of repression in many States. Their authorities, who not only fail to respect human rights, also wish to silence those who attempt to denounce these facts. The present state of the world unfortunately brings us to another trend: the tendency to accept torture in the fight against terrorism. When a convention prohibiting torture was adopted twenty years ago, in 1984, it had the very clear objective of ranking torture among the gravest crimes human beings could commit against other human beings”.
A few highlights from the Annual Report of 2003 include:
• The OMCT coordinates the preparation and presentation of reports to the UN Human Rights Committee and the Committee against Torture
• The OMCT Violence against Women Programme was recognised by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women
• The OMCT organised, in collaboration with the Chechen NGO ‘Echo of War’, a training seminar on the United Nations human rights mechanisms.
Read the full Annual Report 2003 here.