A Continuing Shame
The United Nations and human rights.

Rich Lowry
March 7, 2006
National Review
Original Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200603070816.asp

Wherever she is right now, the late Eleanor Roosevelt is probably having a kind thought about U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton. The ambassador is the liberal bugaboo who was filibustered by Senate Democrats before heading to Turtle Bay. Now he is fighting a valiant, probably losing fight to reform the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
Roosevelt was the commission’s first chairman back in 1947, and thought the commission would play an important international role by shaming human-rights abusers. Over time, the commission’s mandate evolved into passing over human-rights abuses in silence and, instead, shaming itself. Bolton had hoped to change the commission and infuse it with some of its old idealism. Nothing doing. He’s finding that at the U.N. Augean Stables, the cattle always prevail.
The 53-country human-rights commission’s abiding flaw is that it has no standards for membership. So, bloodthirsty tyrannies sit on it together with liberal democracies. Given the let’s-all-get-along bonhomie of the United Nations, they all operate based on a vaporous consensus that strips the commission of any purpose. China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe are all current members, ensuring ample representation of governments interested only in preserving their ability to jail their dissidents, repress their women and despoil their countrysides.
Human-rights abusers are particularly drawn to the commission so they can eliminate any diplomatic or moral threat it might pose to their misrule. They can vote as a bloc to oppose any strenuous language directed at themselves or fellow abusers. On the inside, they subtly influence the process in their favor. Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the human-rights group Freedom House, recounts how a few years ago the European sponsors of a resolution condemning Sudan reached out to Khartoum to help draft the language. It was duly massaged to remove any reference to “slavery,” even though the commission’s own officials had confirmed Sudan’s involvement in it.
The decorous treatment afforded murderous governments does not extend to democratic Israel, which is the target of numerous resolutions during every yearly session of the commission. It’s as if the global human-rights picture would be paradisiacal if it weren’t for a country of six million that is forced to defend itself from the savage terror attacks of people who don’t want it to exist. Israel consumes much of the commission’s time and energy, while it has never bothered to pass a resolution condemning the practices of the Chinese government.
John Bolton and the U.S. proposed reducing the commission’s membership from 53 countries to 30, thus making it harder to get on, and requiring a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly to approve members in an attempt to keep the worst abusers off. These reforms have been effectively trashed. A counterproposal that is likely to pass pegs the membership at 47, approved by a mere majority of the General Assembly. The biggest change is literally nominal: No longer will it be the United Nations Human Rights Commission, but the Human Rights Council. The moral stink will remain, whatever they call it.
Debates over the U.N. feature an odd dynamic. It is skeptics like Bolton who favor making it a more effective and worthy institution. It is the U.N. worshippers who have standards for the world body so low that it will always remain mired in disrepute. So it is that Jimmy Carter is in favor of the current evisceration of the reforms. For such U.N. supporters, it appears that genuinely high-minded multilateralism is not as important as maintaining the United Nations and other international bodies as an irritant to American power. Carter made a personal promise to the ambassadors of Egypt, Pakistan, and Cuba — not a democracy among them — that he would side with them on commission reform.
Eleanor Roosevelt would no doubt be surprised at how low her treasured world body has sunk, and who is working to make it better.
— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.