Human Rights, wrongs and rationalizations at the UN
UNITED NATIONS — In what was triumphantly heralded as a historic moment, the General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a new Human Rights Council to replace the old and discredited Human Rights Commission. The King is dead, Long Live the King!? Most appropriately the vote taken on the ides of March, was not so much a stab in the back to the U.S. but a ludicrously lopsided tally with 170 countries in favor and the U.S., Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau against.
So what’s the story? Establishing the newfangled Human Rights Council was one of those trumpeted reforms passed to celebrate the UN’s 60th anniversary last year. The challenge was to replace the Geneva-based 53 member forum with a more “workable” 47 member body still set to hold court on the pleasant shores of Lake Geneva. Rather than its annual six week session, the Council will meet three times totaling at least ten weeks.
Washington and anybody else who bothered to notice saw the former commission increasingly hijacked by many of the human rights offenders it was supposed to watch—Sudan, Zimbabwe, etc. In a particularly cute touch a few years a back, a Libyan was elevated to chair the commission while the USA was voted off the body.
Mind you the old commission did bring some pressures on places like Cuba and China, but was usually thwarted in the end by the simple arithmetic of the UN membership itself—the majority of the UN’s 191 member states could care less about the U.S. commitment to global human rights and are not made up of nice guys from Canada, Costa Rica and the Czech Republic.
The new forum apparently has tougher membership rules and higher standards but don’t raise your spirits and presume that the likes of a Sudan or a Zimbabwe won’t get on board when the General Assembly meets in early May to elect membership and the Council goes into session in June.
“Members of the Council would be elected by the majority of the members of the General Assembly. Each candidate would be voted on individually and directly and would have to obtain at least ninety-six votes of support in a secret ballot,” Eliasson stated.
Mind you given the political make up of the Assembly, the answer should be obvious
Chastising the Islamic thugocray running Sudan for its widely condemned human rights abuses in Darfur would seemingly be a slam dunk for what is euphemistically called the world community. The brutal violence which has killed tens of thousands and displaced a minimum of two million people, has churned on for years. The world wrings its hands, and takes band-aid measures to help the victims, but is yet to effectively confront the Khartoum regime and stop the violence. It’s not that Sudan has a gaggle of Gucci-attired K Street lobbyists or even many left wing apologists, or their oil wealth, but because with the nearly notable exception of Israel, concern for human rights is viewed as really meddling in the internal affairs of a particular country.
Khartoum’s delegate commenting on the newly established Council scoffed, “The Sudan did not need any lessons on human rights from the United States.” (sic)
In a separate development, the Bush Administration will redouble its efforts to promote democracy as the heart of U.S. foreign policy (hopefully with better effect than Jimmy Carter’s ill fated blunders).
So shall the new Council be effective? Ambassador Bolton expressed skepticism saying that “absence assurance of a credible membership….he could not say that the new body would be better than its predecessor.”
The Ambassador added, “The real test would be the quality of membership that emerged on the Council and whether that would include countries like the Sudan, Cuba, Iran, Belarus and Burma to name a few.” Indeed those regimes along with People’s China and Venezuela, richly merit consideration and action as key human rights transgressors.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com. |
