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What is the Point of a Commonwealth Charter?

In September 2012, three Nobel prize-winners issued an open letter, urging member states not to sign any Commonwealth charter of values unless proper enforcement mechanisms were put in place. The idea of a new charter that would provide an authoritative statement of the organisation’s fundamental principles was one of the most prominent recommendations of the Commonwealth’s 2011 Eminent Persons Group (EPG). Particular emphasis is likely to be given to the Commonwealth’s commitment to democracy, the rule of law and human rights. The letter’s three signatories—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka—urged the Commonwealth to shed its ‘repetitive rhetoric’ on shared values, and instead devise ‘a credible, authoritative and specific mechanism to verify serious breaches of these principles and recommend healing and redress, to make more effective the work of the Commonwealth Secretary-General and the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group of Foreign Ministers’. Without a guarantee that words will be matched with actions, Commonwealth governments should refuse to endorse the charter. Indeed, a charter lacking improved methods of implementation would, in the words of the Nobel prize-winners, be ‘a service sheet for the Commonwealth’s funeral’. It is difficult not to feel a great deal of sympathy for this call by three distinguished Commonwealth citizens. The open letter was coordinated by Richard Bourne, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, who has made an outstanding contribution to establishing human rights as a central concern of the Commonwealth’s network of non-governmental organisations. Bourne’s scepticism about the value of a new statement of values is widely shared among those with equally long experience of the Commonwealth’s weakness for ‘repetitive rhetoric’. This tendency towards empty verbosity has grown in inverse proportion to the Commonwealth’s tangible achievements. If warm words could effect change by themselves, the Commonwealth would be a leading player in global politics. They can’t, and it isn’t. Yet if seasoned observers of the Commonwealth are wary about the utility of a fresh statement of values, they should surely be equally sceptical about its capacity to devise