The 2001 World Conference against Racism (WCAR), also known as Durban I, was held at the Durban International Convention Centre in Durban, South Africa, under UN auspices, from 31 August to 8 September 2001.
The conference covered several controversial issues, including redress for transatlantic slavery and the second-class citizenry issue in Palestine-Israel. The language of the final Declaration and Programme of Action produced by the conference was strongly disputed in these areas, both in the preparatory meetings in the months that preceded the conference and during the conference itself.
Two delegations, the United States and Israel, withdrew from the conference over objections to a draft document equating Zionism with racism. The final Declaration and Programme of Action did not contain the text that the U.S. and Israel had objected to, that text having been voted out by delegates in the days after the U.S. and Israel withdrew.
In parallel to the conference, a separately held NGO Forum also produced a Declaration and Programme of its own, that was not an official Conference document, which contained language relating to Israel that the WCAR had voted to exclude from its Declaration, and which was criticized by then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson and many others.
The NGO Forum ended in discord. Mary Robinson lost the support of the United States in her office of High Commissioner, and many of the potential political aftereffects of the conference were annulled by the September 11, 2001 attacks. The attacks took place just three days after the conference ended, entirely eclipsing it in the news, and significantly affecting international relations and politics. The conference was followed by the 2009 Durban II conference in Geneva, which was boycotted by ten Western countries. A commemorative Durban III conference in September 2011 in New York has also drawn significant criticism and was boycotted by 14 Western countries.
Preparations
The conference was authorized by United Nations General Assembly Resolution #52/111. Prior to the conference various preparatory meetings (PrepComs) were held in order to identify conference themes and to create initial drafts of the Declaration and Programme of Action. These PrepComs encountered difficulties from the start.
The first problem was the question of what the conference theme was to be. The Western European states, along with the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, all wanted the conference objectives to be those given in the authorizing resolution. The Africa Group, the Latin American states, and the Caribbean states wanted the conference objectives to go beyond what was in the resolution, and include items dealing with regional, national, and international measures for compensation for colonialism and slavery.
Prior to the conference, there were also four Regional Conferences, in Strasbourg, Santiago, Dakar, and Tehran.
The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action
The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action were adopted by the governmental delegates attending the Conference at the International Convention Centre.
Compensation for colonialism and slavery
The issue of compensation for colonialism and slavery is addressed in ¶ 13, ¶ 14, ¶ 15, and ¶ 29 of the Declaration. It was one of the most controversial issues debated at the conference, one that had the potential to derail the entire conference. It was dealt with cleverly in the Declaration, containing rhetoric that satisfied the African bloc, without applying retroactively against the descendants of colonizers the principle of crimes against humanity and without establishing a clear responsibility for reparations on the parts of former colonial states.
The wording of the Declaration struck a delicate balance. Whilst acknowledging historical and contemporary practices of slavery and the slave trade as morally outrageous, and something that would be a crime against humanity today, it did not apply that legal principle to an era before the principle actually existed. The Durban Declaration provides that states recognize "that these historical injustices [slavery, colonialism, genocide, apartheid] have undeniably contributed to the poverty, underdevelopment, marginalization, social exclusion, economic disparities, instability and insecurity that affect many people in different parts of the world, in particular in developing countries." (Article 158)