Tribute to Flora Macdonald, a former foreign minister of Canada and well-known “Red Tory”, who passed away last week.
Flora Macdonald, a former foreign minister of Canada and well-known “Red Tory”, passed away last week. She was a particularly strong friend of the Commonwealth. Richard Bourne, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, shared this remembrance:
Flora MacDonald may be best known to an international public for her documentary footage in the film "Argo", welcoming home the former prisoners in Iran who escaped by dint of an audacious phony movie.
But members of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative have reason to thank her for a particular reason -- her enthusiasm for a stronger Commonwealth commitment to human rights. She chaired a distinguished group of seven persons in 1990-1991 which published "Put Our World to Rights", the manifesto of the CHRI which had a strong influence on the Harare Declaration of 1991, leading to its commitment to fundamental human rights.
With her support, as a former Canadian Foreign Minister, the Canadian International Development Agency was persuaded not only to fund that exercise, but the move of the CHRI office from London to New Delhi in 1993. In 1995 she led a fact-finding mission to Nigeria, then in the grip of the kleptocratic and abusive dictatorship of General Abacha, which published an expose report, "Nigeria: Stolen by Generals". The cover photo was of children kept behind barbed wire. Its wide-ranging critique coincided with the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni chiefs; together these events, and intense lobbying by the CHRI with others, helped to convince Commonwealth leaders to set up a rules committee, the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group, at the New Zealand summit in that year. Nigeria and two other West African states under military rule were suspended from membership.
I greatly enjoyed working with Flora, when I was the first Director of CHRI. She had a good sense of humour, went speed-skating into her 80s, and was passionate for Canada, human rights and women's rights. She strongly believed that the Commonwealth ought to be doing far more for its citizens, and the world. She will be sorely missed.