No: 212/99
Date:17 December 1999

The Government submits a new Plan of Action for Human Rights outlining more than 300 different measures

The Government will further implement the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in Norwegian law and will put forward a separate statute prohibiting ethnic discrimination. A pilot project will be set up for voluntary reporting, monitoring and verification in the context of human rights and business and industry, and a resource centre for the rights of indigenous peoples will be established in Finnmark or Tromsø. The Government has approved the establishment of a separate Muslim primary and lower secondary school, and intends to establish a human rights dialogue with Indonesia.

Today the Government submitted a white paper (Report No. 21 (1999-2000) to the Storting) setting out a Plan of Action for Human Rights entitled Focus on Human Dignity. The Plan outlines more than 300 different measures for promoting human rights in Norway and internationally and has a time frame of five years. The Norwegian Plan of Action is one the first of its kind to be drawn up in the Western world, and one of the first to include both national and international measures.

The Government is proposing to further implement four key human rights conventions into Norwegian law: the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

The Government is seeking to enhance the protection of human rights in Norway. In this connection the Plan takes up the use of remand and the length of time spent on dealing with criminal cases. Questions relating to social welfare and health care are also dealt with.

The Government wishes to give the Institute for Human Rights the status of a national institution for human rights, as recommended by the UN.

The Government will support the scheme to provide refuge for persecuted writers.

In the Plan, particular attention is given to measures concerning the Sami people and Sami culture, asylum and immigration law, and the rights of the disabled. Efforts to raise the level of knowledge and disseminate information in the field of human rights will be intensified.

The national measures must also be seen in connection with international efforts to promote human rights. It is the view of the Government that if Norway is to be in a position to criticize violations of human rights abroad, we must be willing to discuss any problems we may have in observing these rights in our own country.

Special priority areas for international efforts to promote human rights include strengthening the human rights dimension in Norwegian development cooperation, promoting children's rights, efforts to prohibit the use of capital punishment, promoting women's rights, improving the situation of homosexuals and lesbians, efforts to eliminate racism, promoting freedom of religion and belief, and efforts to prohibit the use of torture.

Furthermore, our human rights dialogues with countries such as China, Turkey and Cuba will be stepped up, and we will seek to establish such dialogues with Vietnam and Indonesia.

The Government is proposing the establishment of a pilot project concerning the role of business and industry in relation to human rights, in which the principal focus will be on developing voluntary arrangements for reporting on, monitoring and verifying companies' respect for human rights.

The Plan of Action is a follow-up to the strong emphasis placed on human rights efforts in the Voksenåsen Declaration and to the UN World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, which called on the governments of all states to develop national plans of action.

Those interested in following the progress of the implementation of the Plan of Action are referred to the annual reports on Norwegian efforts to promote human rights published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and to the Government's website ( http://www.mr.dep.no/).