Sins of Commission

February 21, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114048850884978688.html
So the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission publishes a study denouncing U.S. detention practices at Guantanamo, and world opinion is supposed to be outraged. Well, count us in: Once again, the Commission has amply demonstrated why even Secretary General Kofi Annan wants to replace it with something better. This being the U.N., however, the reform effort is now being bungled.
We won't waste your time on the study itself, which largely rehashes factual and legal allegations we've seen and rebutted before, and whose authors never actually visited Guantanamo. One of the authors, Algerian jurist Leila Zerrougui, was last heard denouncing Israel's security fence, which has helped reduce suicide bombings by 90%.
A more interesting question is why this report was produced in the first place: We are still waiting for the Commission's reports on the human-rights picture in, say, Syria. But there's no mystery here, since the only purpose the Commission actually serves is to deflect criticism of actual human-rights abusers by heaping invective on the U.S. and Israel.
It is for this reason that we were initially prepared to support Mr. Annan's call last year to abolish the Commission in favor of a Human Rights Council. Part of what recommended the proposal was Mr. Annan's call for the size of the Council to be reduced and for Council members to be elected by two-thirds of the General Assembly. That way, it was reasoned, a country such as Sudan (a current member of the Commission, along with fellow paragons Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe) would be less likely to stand for a seat, and more likely to be defeated if it did.
Fast forward a few months, and here's what the sages of the U.N. actually propose. Instead of a Commission composed of 53 member states, the Council would consist of 45. Now there's a bold step. The U.N. also appears ready to drop the two-thirds majority requirement in favor of a simple majority, lowering the bar to membership. And a modest proposal to exclude countries under legally binding Chapter VII U.N. sanctions (as Iraq was before its liberation) has been excluded, presumably because it's too tough on the world's worst regimes.
Instead, the U.N. proposes distributing seats according to what it calls equitable geographic distribution: 12 seats to Africa; 13 to Asia (including the Middle East); eight to Latin America; five to East Europe and seven to the so-called West European and Others Group, which includes the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel.
Thus the two groups that contain the greatest proportion of liberal democracies are allotted the smallest number of seats. By contrast, in 2005 only nine countries in the whole of Africa were rated free, according to Freedom House. In Asia and the Middle East, only about a dozen of 54 countries are free, and that's if you're counting Tuvalu, Palau, Nauru and Kiribati.
Put simply, this structure not only fails to exclude abusive regimes from membership in the Council, it actually guarantees them their seats. And it is rigged against the very countries whose opinions about human rights might be other than blatantly hypocritical. As to the potential merit of those opinions, we'll leave it to posterity to decide whether what the world really needed in this decade was another platform for Scandinavian highmindedness.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton has made it clear to his U.N. colleagues that the current proposal is not something the Bush Administration can endorse. That's a stand that will surely burnish his reputation in certain liberal circles as an obstructionist. But fake reform is worse than no reform at all, and whatever else might be said of the current system, it at least has the virtue of being discredited.
The world can certainly wait a few months more to get the human-rights agency that genuine human-rights victims deserve. The fact that the U.N. is incapable of providing one is yet another reminder of what ails the organization, especially under its current management.