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13.
The remaining plenary sessions were on parliamentary subjects: "Parliament, the Executive and the Civil Service" and "Freedom of the Individual, Human Rights and the Authority of Government in a Parliamentary Democracy". The lead speaker for the latter was Dr Dickson Mabon, deputy leader of the UK delegation. He chose to include in his speech a reference to The Gambia's proposal for a Commonwealth Human Rights Commission, suggesting that delegates might take advantage of the debate to comment on it. He added that whether such a commission would be the proper way to proceed or whether it might be better to have regional charters (as in Europe) was a matter for debate. Several of the subsequent speakers picked up the point. The Jamaican Minister of Justice, Senator Rattray, said he personally would welcome the establishment of a Commonwealth Human Rights Commission. Support for the idea was also voiced by Trinidad's Leader of the Opposition (Mr Panday), an Australian Opposition MP and (by implication) a Barbados delegate. The absence of comment from other delegates probably reflected the fact that the delegations at CPA conferences are parliamentary rather than governmental; and it is likely that many delegates were quite unaware of Gambia's proposal.
14. Dr Mabon also referred to the enforced abandonment by the Canadian Government of their proposal at the UN for the establish- ment of an Under-Secretary with special responsibility in the human rights field. His invitation to fellow delegates to comment on this was not picked up - which in the case of the three Indian speakers was not perhaps surprising, since he mentioned India's role in undermining the proposal.
15. Although delegates from the sub-continent tended to be inaudible or unintelligible, none of them appeared to comment on the British Government's new immigration proposals; and the only criticism actually voiced (which was implicit rather than explicit) was from an Australian opposition member, alluding to the restriction on women bringing non-British fiancés or husbands into the UK.
16. The CPA's Summary Report of the Conference is attached.
General
17. For better and for worse, this was a dull conference. From our point of view, qua Rhodesia, it was good that it was so. In other respects, it was a pity that it was not a little livelier. I believe that several factors contributed to its rather prosaic character. Above all, there was the extraordinary shape of the hall. The New Zealanders had, curiously, decided to hold the conference proper in their new Parliamentary annexe, called The Beehive; thus, as will be seen from Annex C, delegates found themselves sitting in an area where some were wholly invisible to others. One consequence of this was that all delegates spoke from a central microphone; and this in turn encouraged an existing tendency to speak from prepared texts in fact something like 75% of delegates did so. Thus the ebb and
/flow
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