Human Rights and U.N. Wrongs 
Another item for the reform agenda. 

by Robert McMahon 
May 23, 2005
The Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/005/616gmkuw.asp

FEW ARE HAPPY WITH A U.N. Human Rights Commission that has routinely welcomed into its ranks some of the world's most monstrous regimes. But Secretary General Kofi Annan's plan to overhaul the dysfunctional commission is no solution. It hinges on a crucial, flawed premise--that member states are capable of choosing peers who can properly police rights abuses. Annan's proposal, initially embraced by many in the West, would replace the 53-country commission with a smaller, permanent Human Rights Council. The U.N. General Assembly would elect members to this council by a two-thirds majority. These members, the proposal says, should undertake to abide by the highest human rights standards.
The goal is to end the practice whereby serial rights-abusers regularly lobby for election to the human rights commission and then band together to block any meaningful scrutiny of their records.
But Annan's proposal amounts to reshuffling the same tainted cards. The General Assembly, after all, is already responsible for appointing states to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which chooses the members of the human rights commission. There is no reason to expect that the ingrained deal-making involved in picking commission members would change if the General Assembly were made directly responsible.
Votes in the assembly to fill the U.N.'s councils, commissions, or committees are usually foregone conclusions after the five U.N. regional groups promote candidates. Within each region, the choices are sometimes the result of intense politicking, sometimes merely amount to a country's taking its turn in the rotation. Adhering to any human rights standard, much less the highest such standards, is rarely a consideration. The human rights watchdog Freedom House notes in its latest survey that nearly one-third of the commission's members are not free and another quarter are only partly free.
The most recent selection of members to the commission, in late April, is illustrative. The Latin America group chose Venezuela, the Africa group's choice was Zimbabwe, and the Asia group renewed China for another three-year term. The Eastern Europe group, with a growing number of transitional democracies, produced an actual competition between authoritarian Azerbaijan and new E.U. member Latvia. ECOSOC chose Azerbaijan.
Annan's proposal seeks to get around this regional maneuvering by giving the General Assembly a direct vote. But the assembly, which holds its own debate on human rights each autumn, goes through the same annual charade as the Geneva-based commission. Last November, coalitions banded together in the assembly to defeat, through procedural moves, a resolution denouncing human rights violations in Sudan's Darfur region as well as measures critical of Zimbabwe and Belarus.
A frustrated U.S. ambassador John Danforth said after the Sudan vote: One wonders about the utility of the General Assembly on days like this. In both Geneva and New York, members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Non-Aligned Movement are especially outspoken. They typically denounce single-country resolutions and, to the extent they acknowledge human rights problems, prefer technical assistance to any criticism of particular governments (though these same states vote overwhelmingly to censure Israel for actions against Palestinians).
After witnessing her first commission session last month as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, a Canadian supreme court justice, told reporters the agency carries so much baggage that it is now in my view an impediment to its capacity to do the most difficult part of its work, which is the monitoring of the effective implementation of human rights.
The Bush administration has begun to look for a solution in a democracy caucus at the U.N., drawn from the nascent Community of Democracies. At the community's latest ministerial meeting in Chile on April 28, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged members to work together at the U.N. to create a legitimate human rights body. The community wrapped up its meeting with a statement pledging to do just that.
But the democracy caucus is off to a sluggish start. It has been a mostly mute presence at the past two human rights commission sessions. Worse, two founding members of the Community of Democracies--India and South Africa--regularly align themselves with rights abusers on the commission to block so-called naming and shaming resolutions. Another key democracy, Brazil, usually abstains or votes against such resolutions because it doesn't believe in their effectiveness.
Caucus members acknowledge a fault line on human rights issues that runs roughly between democracies from the developing and the developed world. It reflects, in part, the continued influence of the Non-Aligned Movement, which emphasizes social and economic rights over civil and political rights. But the effort to make the democracy caucus a force for human rights advocacy at the U.N. is still a promising one. Eastern Europe and Latin American states such as Chile and Mexico are lending the most energy to the initiative. Eastern European leaders often refer to their own recent history under communism as proof of the value of shining an international spotlight on human rights issues. Mexico, under Vicente Fox, has won applause from rights experts for its efforts on the commission. It has consistently supported resolutions censuring Cuba, a sharp rebuke to the Castro regime.
But it will take years before a critical mass of states at the U.N. regularly vote to uphold the organization's founding principles on human rights. Perhaps the disbandment of the Human Rights Commission should take place, as Kofi Annan intends, just for the symbolic value of burying a discredited institution. But we should not expect any replacement selected by the General Assembly, whatever it's called, to make much of an improvement in the short term.
Robert McMahon, a senior correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has covered U.N. affairs since 2000.