Just eight years after Malta first hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), it has once again been invited to do so in 2015. This came about as a result of Mauritius, which was next in line to do so, disqualifying itself by failing to attend the meeting in Sri Lanka in protest at the host country’s human rights record.
That Malta should have been invited, by consensus, to step into the breach is a great compliment to this country and to the undoubted earlier success of CHOGM 2005.
Malta will benefit both in international political and economic terms from hosting CHOGM 2015. Quite apart from the perennial joke from hard-pressed Maltese about the benefits accruing from new roads and a countrywide clean-up, there will be not only an injection of new cash into the economy from the thousands of new visitors over the period, but also exposure in the media to the attractions of Malta.
The key question to be addressed, however, is about the Commonwealth itself, and the biennial Heads of Government meeting. In the light of CHOGM in Sri Lanka, what value added does the Commonwealth actually provide?
There can be no argument that recent events in Sri Lanka have cast serious doubts on the value and efficacy of this 53-nation summit. The future of the Commonwealth has become an uncomfortable foreign policy issue.
The record is not pretty. Perhaps a third of the Commonwealth’s member states have been accused of serious human rights abuses. In many member countries the police run rampant. Homosexuality is illegal in 41 out of 53 states. Justice in some countries is dispensed in a wayward manner.
The recent summit in Sri Lanka was dogged throughout by protest about President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s maltreatment of Tamil civilians during Sri Lanka’s brutal 30-year civil war, which ended in 2009. The Canadian and Indian Prime Minister – among two of the biggest players in the Commonwealth – and the Mauritian Prime Minister refused to attend the meeting in disapproval. British Prime Minister David Cameron found himself embroiled from the start of the conference in an open argument with his host on the need for an independent investigation into Sri Lanka’s conduct of the war against the Tamil Tigers.
In contrast, the Commonwealth has just signed up to its own charter of values and respect for human rights. The Commonwealth is meant to be a community of shared values. There are, too, shared problems, such as climate change, and there are shared priorities for economic growth, higher literacy and the abolition of poverty in the poorer countries. There are also shared enthusiasms that bind, for example at the Commonwealth Games.
But unless the Commonwealth finds a way to encourage true compliance with those values and common objectives, there is a danger that it could become irrelevant. One has only to look at the African Union or the Arab League to have a glimpse of the future.
Unless ways are found to re-generate the Commonwealth, the low point to which it has sunk could be a harbinger of worse to come.
India, Canada, Australia, the UK of course (even though its post-colonial position hampers its room for manoeuvre), and the smaller states that have embraced democracy, such as Malta, should make a start by pushing for adherence to standards and a properly empowered commissioner for human rights.
CHOGM 2015 in Malta could well provide the last opportunity for the future of the Commonwealth to be assured.