UN General Assembly
1989

Experience, though recent, has already shown that this department is playing an essential role in providing information to citizens on their rights and freedoms; it is intervening and redressing acts involving damage done when individuals have seen their rights unjustly violated and have exhausted all other machinery of recourse? and it oversees respect for procedures, conditions and proper treatment with regard to detainees. Zaire welcomes the tribute paid to it by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in February this year in omitting its name, on the basis of what had been achieved in this field, from the list of countries considered as not respecting human rights. Of course, we recognize that we have not yet reached the ideal situation, but the fact that all countries of the world, even the most advanced, do not escape criticism when it comes to the violation of individual rights adequately shows that one cannot, on the basis of an administrative or police slip-up noted here or there, confuse a State of law with States that have made repression their system of government.