Human rights panel is a test for hopes of reforming U.N. 
January 9, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times
Original Source: http://www.suntimes.com/output/commentary/cst-edt-edits09.html

The barometer for reform at the United Nations will be the willingness of member nations to make massive changes to the structure of the disreputable body known as the U.N. Human Rights Commission. This week negotiators will meet to thrash through proposed changes to the Geneva-based commission whose members have included some of the most noxious abusers of human rights in the world, including China, Cuba, Sudan and Nepal, among others. 
As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted last March when he recommended transforming the 53-member Human Rights Commission into a smaller Human Rights Council: States have sought membership of the commission not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others. 
It was a travesty that Zimbabwe was once again elected last year -- over the objections of the United States, Australia and Canada -- to serve on the commission. President Robert Mugabe has systematically driven thousands of his countrymen from their homes and run his country as a virtual dictatorship. 
The Sudanese government, also on the Human Rights Commission, has armed Arab militiamen, the Janjaweed, to raid black African villages in the Darfur region, killing, raping and maiming residents and causing the dislocation of more than 2 million people. It is genocide on an enormous scale. 
Cuba, another member, jails dissidents and journalists and denies democratic rights to its people. China recently sent police into Guangdong province to gun down demonstrators, the largest strike against civilians since the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. 
There is no doubt the commission has had a credibility crisis, says Peggy Hicks, global advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. But even in its worst moments the commission has done things to protect human rights. She points to a mission sent to Nepal to monitor the conflict between the government and Maoist insurgents. But yet nothing has been done to censure China for its violations. 
One of the fundamental problems with the Human Rights Commission is that its membership is formed by region, with each region nominating a slate of representatives. Secretary-General Annan has proposed, instead, that the General Assembly vote for countries and that each nominee get two-thirds approval for membership. This is designed to prevent egregious human rights violators such as Sudan from membership. 
The design of the new Human Rights Council will ultimately reflect the appetite for radically overhauling the U.N. itself, an organization tarnished by corruption -- the Oil for Food scandal -- and dysfunction. If a creditable Human Rights Council cannot be appointed, it doesn't say much for the possibility of meaningful change at the U.N. as a whole.