October 8, 2001

Her Excellency Ms. Mary Robinson

High Commissioner for Human Rights

c/o Ms. Laurie Wiseberg, NGO Liaison

Palais Wilson, Geneva, Switzerland

VIA FACSIMILE and email attachment

Please receive our respectful greetings.

Please find a plan for follow-up to Durban, attached, as discussed in our final brief meeting with you and several members of the ISC. As you reflected at the final NGO briefing with you in Durban, the Durban WCAR can be only a beginning of a long and serious road, a starting point in the struggle to end racism. This proposed follow-up is based on retracing the preparatory process to Durban, by NGOs. It is in effect a call to NGOs that they not forget Durban but to take Durban back to the grass-roots to begin the struggle against racism.

We also appreciated your clarification at that final briefing, of certain press statements attributed to you, that you had not rejected the NGO Declaration and Programme of Action and had accepted it, in spite of two paragraphs you saw as "inappropriate" and "unhelpful." You also informed us that you were not able to recommend our document to the states because of these same two paragraphs.

We believe you would agree that it would be tragic to reject the NGO Forum Declaration and Programme of Action, consisting of 473 paragraphs, because of any controversy surrounding two. At the final NGO briefing, we also very much appreciated your calling attention to the rest of the NGO Document, the "good" parts, including the preamble and many other sections and paragraphs, and particularly the NGO Document’s identification of the victims of racism. We very much appreciated your remarks at the final briefing to the effect that the document reflected that those affected most adversely by racism, the so-called "victims," had been given a voice and space. As you reflected, "these voices speak for millions of people who have been tortured, humiliated and marginalized because of who they are."

It is these voices that we would not abandon now.

As is reflected in this proposal, there can be no ownership of the follow-up process because we as NGOs, as Caucuses, as the High Commissioner, as well as the States, must all take ownership ourselves.

We were gratified when you informed us at our brief and final meeting that you may have your own plans for follow-up, and that you hoped to devote some scarce resources to it. We suggest that a great contribution to the follow-up process would be to maintain your offices’ multi-language capacity to keep NGOs connected and informed as to anti-racism activity at the international, regional and national levels. Although the voices of the victims of racism were heard at the NGO Forum, we speak in many languages and our solidarity and future work in common depends a great deal on our ability to communicate effectively and in a timely manner with each other.

We hope that this plan is useful to you. We realize that relatively little resources can be devoted by your office to the struggle against racism. We seek only to maximize those NGO resources that were created, with your help and support, via the WCAR preparatory process. Your participation and support of NGO participation in these processes were critical to whatever success they had. Your participation and support in any follow-up to Durban is equally important.

Again, thank you for your continuing support in this most important common endeavor. As stated in Paragraph 62 of the NGO Forum Declaration, we remain:

for all my relations,

Alberto Saldamando

On behalf of the International Steering Committee

cc: ISC Members via email