Restore credibility to United Nations panel
Bar Serial Abusers from Human Rights Commission 

January 6, 2006
Miami Herald
Original Source: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/13559303.htm
It seems a certainty that the discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission will be reformed, and the sooner the better. The goal should be to create an international protector and promoter of human rights, one that punishes violators and takes action before it's too late to stop genocide and crimes against humanity. Doing this, however, means departing from business-as-usual: The new panel must be insulated from politics and focused on objective standards of human rights.
Damaged reputation
The United Nations has discussed proposed changes for years within the context of overall structural and management reforms. There's urgency to act on human rights because the current commission's lack of legitimacy ''casts a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole,'' said Secretary General Kofi Annan. U.N. executives would determine the human-rights reforms quickly if they want to rescue U.N. credibility this year.
How the Human Rights Commission is transformed is crucial to avoiding current problems. Chronic violators -- like Cuba, Sudan and Libya -- join the commission to deflect criticism of their own records. But their participation weakens the U.N.'s overall effectiveness. That's unacceptable.
The U.N. reforms should:
• Create a human-rights council, raising it to the status of the Security and Development councils that already exist.
• Provide enough resources for the council to work year-round and act whenever human-rights abuses are uncovered.
• Bar members with dismal human-rights records. This determination should be made by independent experts based on universally accepted human-rights principles and international law.
• Reduce the number of members from the current 53 to a more manageable number of nations with good human-rights records.
• Keep political considerations or conflicts of interest from tainting the selection of members or the assessment of human-rights abuses. China, for example, should not be able to block sanctions against Sudan, a valued oil supplier.
Terrible records
In no way should the U.N. Security Council's five permanent members be assured permanent seats on the new human-rights council, as U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton is arguing. Such a policy would promise seats to two nations with terrible human-rights records -- China and Russia. Their presence would damage the new council's credibility and defeat the purpose of the reforms in the first place.
Instead, the United States should advocate for a smaller, stronger and nimble human-rights protector that will intervene to prevent human-rights crises.