The dropping of cluster bombs knowing they will drift into civilian areas does not serve a human rights cause, according to the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson.
She appealed to the Irish Government to take more Kosovan refugees, and to make it as easy as possible for those deeply traumatised people to come here. Mrs Robinson was speaking to journalists after addressing a gathering of the Conference of Religious of Ireland on Saturday.
While stressing that she was not equating the NATO bombing campaign with President Milosevic's policy of ethnic cleansing, which she said must be stopped, Mrs Robinson said that human rights defenders in Yugoslavia felt undermined by the bombing. "They told me `we don't see the rule of law in the bombing campaign'," she said.
She described how in the town of Nis she had visited an area very like Ballymun - though much poorer - which had been hit by NATO bombs. Children were playing near unexploded cluster bombs. "There was no visible sign of a military target," she said.
Referring to NATO's justification of the recent bombing in Kosovo, she said this meant the civilian population was in very grave danger.
It was not so much that civilians were being targeted, but that the bombing was so wide in its range it was inevitable they would be hit. She said the principle of proportionality was a human rights principle. This was especially important when there was a human rights objective to the bombing.
"There are no military casualties on those carrying out the campaign. That's the kind of campaign it is," she said. "There's a big moral issue here."
She said Macedonia was overwhelmed by the numbers of refugees fleeing across the border. "They agreed to take 20,000. There are 200,000. They described it as a human social bomb coming across the border."
The economy was collapsing because of the war, she continued. The Macedonian president had said the European countries had promised to help, but had done nothing.
"Ireland can, and should, take refugees, as should other countries," she said. "As I read the figures for unemployment and house prices I saw that Ireland is doing very well. We should proactively make it as easy as possible for these deeply traumatised people to come here."
Through the human rights monitors her office had sent to the area it had documented many, many instances of human rights violations: people driven from their homes, men shot in front of their families.
This documentation was part of preparing cases for the International Criminal Tribunal, and finding witnesses willing to appear there.
She said this meant that when she saw the Serb foreign minister, who denied there was a policy of ethnic cleansing, she was able to say she had documented evidence of hundreds of thousands of human rights violations. The fact that they knew this and did nothing meant that there was a policy, she told him.