A clear and steady voice: The commonwealth human rights initiative at 20.

Responding to British complaints in 1987 of excessive focus on human rights violations in South Africa, four professional associations launched a massive survey of human rights throughout the Commonwealth. Dismayed by inadequacies in the Harare Declaration, the CHRI became a formal non-governmental institution and published a searching study of rights violations in different contexts ahead of each Commonwealth summit. Its headquarters rotated in 1993 to Delhi from where a worldwide program to increase freedom of information and press for reform of police and prison systems, as the basis for securing other human rights, has made impressive headway. The article also describes its impact on the Commonwealth Secretariat's work and its involvement with the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]