Pursuant to the UDHR, the issue of citizen rights is universal. With the Honorable Maurice Kamto's story as backdrop, gain insight as to how those rights can be undermined and what elected officials in United States capital are doing about it.
Imagine that you are a member of a community that discriminates against a minority of its citizens. Like everyone privileged to live on this planet, you must decide whether to play the cards you were dealt to the best of their ability; you decide to make the most of your situation. As a result, your list of accomplish include becoming a respected professor of international law, a former dean of the faculty at University, and former chairman and special rapporteur of the U.N. International Law Commission. Your role in the latter led to successful negotiations that resolved a dispute with a border country.
The trajectory of your life leads to a prominent political appointment back home. Seeing an opportunity to help your marginalized community, you withdraw from government to form a movement that opposes policies of the current administration. Several years later, you run for president. You challenge the results, declare yourself the winner, and engage in peaceful protests. In retaliation, the government burns villages, closes schools, apprehends protesters, tortures and kills some, and you are on trial facing the death penalty. Such is the story of Cameroonian Maurice Kamto.
Cameroon is a country divided by two legal systems: the majority French civil law; the minority British common law. This division occurred when Germany lost its African colonies after World War II. The majority of Cameroon went to France; the Southern remainder to the United Kingdom. In 2017, the Cameroon Civil War, known as the Anglophone Crisis, broke out in Anglophone Cameroon. The following year, Mr. Kamto ran for president. Earlier this year, he was arrested.
Although Mr. Kamto, a Francophone Cameroonian, exercised UDHR 29 to better the lives of fellow citizens, his government violated UDHR 30 by interfering with the rights of its citizens. While Mr. Kamots’s and his fellow Anglophone civilian supporters and protests organizers of lawyers, teachers, and students exercising UDHR Articles 19, 20 and 21 to form opinions, peacefully assemble and to participate in government, their government violently repressed them by violating UDHR Articles 3, 5, 9 and 26 by interfering with their rights to life, liberty and personal security, and by committing torture, murder, imprisonment, and closing schools.
Although the Anglophone Crisis is not widely reported in the media, the United States House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee have introduced H.Res.358 and S.Res.292, respectively, calling for the Cameroonian government to respect the human rights of all its citizens. Why should you care? Quoting Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist…Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.” UDHR 29 requires the same of us: to speak out. Maurice Kamto did. He set an example for the rest of us.
اسمي جنيس