OAS Rights Commission Joins War on Cuban Doctors
The Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) published a report this week that essentially endorses the Trump administration’s war on Cuba’s medical missions.
The report, titled “Labor rights of healthcare personnel in medical missions from Cuba,” describes the missions as “forced labor” and asks member states of the OAS to abandon their bilateral agreements with Cuba on healthcare.
The IACHR chose the Museum of the Cuban Diaspora as the venue to present the report. The Museum is a stronghold for Cuban-American hardliners who champion Trump’s economic war on Cuba.
The commission's findings bolster the Trump administration’s campaign to smear the missions, part of the larger goal of pressuring countries to cut ties with Cuba. Since last year, the U.S. has succeeded in pressuring at least eight countries in Central America and the Caribbean to pull out of the medical missions, jeopardizing the healthcare of thousands in the region.
Two of the IACHR commissioners partially dissented. Roberta Clarke, a Barbadian lawyer, pointed to “serious methodological limitations,” including using abuses that allegedly occurred in Venezuela to generalize about countries around the region. Andrea Pochak, an Argentine lawyer, criticized the report’s authors for refusing to address ambiguities and generalizations.
“Taking into account publicly available information indicating that some governments in the region may be under pressure to end existing cooperation agreements…the report should have warned much more emphatically about the risks of its instrumentalization for purposes different from those stated by the IACHR in bringing visibility to this human rights situation. This is especially relevant considering the source of funding that made the preparation of this report possible,” wrote Pochak, who did not disclose the report's funding source.
To learn more about how the IACHR seems to have been commandeered by the Trump administration, check out our article “The OAS Caves to U.S. Pressure Yet Again.”